


And Tell My Name To Distant Ages

by queenofchildren



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Historical References, History Nerd Bellamy, Mention of Death and Violence, Romance, Sneaky Clarke, Visions, history detectives, just making sure, not really scary even though there is mention of ghosts, reference to mental illness, this makes it seem a lot darker than it is tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 21:02:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8861914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofchildren/pseuds/queenofchildren
Summary: Trying to escape her past, Clarke accidentally stirs up a friendly but determined ghost. Luckily, local historian Bellamy Blake is there to help her uncover crimes of the past and present and bring justice to those who have been wronged. And if in the process she falls for him just a little bit - well, that's just how life goes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Keiraknighted! I hope you enjoy this even though it got a little long.

_October_

So this, Clarke thinks as she looks at the grand house before her, is going to be her home for the next year.

It's... a little bigger than she expected.

To be honest, she didn't really have time to expect much about anything. But whatever image she had in her head when her new boss mentioned that his father was renting out rooms at the "family home“ – this was not it.

_This_ looks like the setting for a period drama.

Three stories high it looms before her, with a steep roof and two lower wings added to each side. The house's dark red bricks are a little washed out by time but still provide a stark contrast to the green window-frames and shutters, the crisp manicured lawn and white gravelled driveway. Then there's the white door with its tall Grecian portico, which was no doubt designed to inspire awe and respect – and still does. Whoever built this house, they were as rich as they were important, and they wanted everyone to know.

Clarke stops in the middle of the long, gravelled driveway to gawk at the house, grasping for any remaining scraps of architectural knowledge from the art history course she took back when she still thought studying both art and medicine was a realistic plan. But that was long ago, and Clarke is exhausted from a delayed flight and subsequent three-hour drive out here, and she doesn't care if her new home is the Buckingham Palace or a damp little hole like her first apartment, as long as it has a bed.

Spotting two cars parked before a low building off to the side of the house, Clarke steers her car there to park alongside the two others, a spotless black Land Rover and a banged-up Toyota.

The wheels of her suitcase are rendered useless by the gravelled driveway, and dragging the heavy thing the last few metres to the entrance is less than pleasant. Pausing ever so often to get a better grip on the suitcase, Clarke takes in more and more details of the house. The closer she gets, the more she can see cracks in the elegant facade: the walls are crumbling in places, two of the windows on the ground floor are cracked, and the stone arch above the doorway is held up by iron rods.

She makes a mental note to find out if there's a second entrance, then steps gingerly up to the door, takes a deep breath, and rings the doorbell.

It only takes a few moments for the door to open and reveal a man she assumes is her new landlord. White-haired and dignified, wearing corduroy pants and a blazer, the man practically screams old money as he smiles at her benignly.

“You must be Miss Griffin! I am Dante Wallace, proud owner of this humble home.“

Suppressing the sudden urge to curtsey, Clarke holds out her hand for him to shake.

“Clarke Griffin.“

But the moment the old man takes her hand, Clarke is gripped with an overwhelming sense of dread, so strong it makes nausea crash over her and her knees buckle. She stumbles forward and manages to catch herself on the doorframe, but there's not enough air getting to her lungs despite her gasping breaths, and her blood is rushing so loudly through her ears it drowns out everything but the loud, clamouring instinct telling her to run, run, run... But her legs are weak and shaking, her limbs paralysed with fear, her stomach roiling and cold sweat trickling down her spine.

Mister Wallace, who has noticed her distress, is holding on to her arm to steady her, but the helpful gesture does nothing but strengthen the feeling until everything inside her is screaming to get away from him.

"Miss Griffin! Miss Griffin, are you unwell?"

Clarke doesn't _know_ , she doesn't know anything but the fact that she needs to get away from here, fast - so, the rational part fighting to get back to the surface suggests, she probably _is_ unwell.

Blackness is clawing at the edges of her vision when she hears it: another, deeper voice coming from inside the house.

"What's going on? Need some help Mister Wallace?"

Clarke can't see the man the voice belongs to, but whatever it was that made her want to flee from Mister Wallace, the same thing now urges her to flee towards this man.

When the man in question appears in the doorframe behind Wallace, nothing more than a blurry shape, she falls forward into his arms.

"Miss Griffin just arrived, but there seems to be something wrong," her landlord explains, and the back of Clarke's neck prickles.

The blurry shape nods, then slings his arm around her waist and pulls her arm across his shoulder.

"Come on, let's get you inside."

They don't have to get far, only to a stiff, high-backed chair near the entrance, where her blurry saviour gently helps her sit down.

"I'll get some water." Again the little prickle at Wallace's voice, but it's getting weaker now, chased off by her unknown helper who is still kneeling before her and rubbing her arms soothingly.

"Can you hear me? Tell me what's happening?"

Clarke musters the strength to nod and then shake her head to answer both his questions - she couldn't tell him what's going on even if she _could_ speak, and she's trying hard not to panic about that.

"Okay, alright, we'll figure this out. Can you breathe?"

Clarke nods, because the nausea is still there, but the tightness in her lungs has eased up.

"Good, that's good." The soothing motion of his hands continues, and slowly, slowly the nausea passes too. "Are you in any pain?"

Clarke shakes her head again, her vision finally clearing when she blinks a few times, and she almost sobs with relief when she can make out more than just shapes and colours. She can actually _see_ the man before her now, down to the freckles dotted across the bridge of his nose. And with that relief, the fear finally loses its grip and she takes a deep breath.

"I'm fine, I just haven't eaten anything since I got on the plane this morning, that's probably it. It's getting better now."

He looks as relieved as she feels, which is sweet considering they're complete strangers.

"Good, that's good."

He starts drawing back his hands when Lord Wallace returns and she tightens her grip instead of letting go, fingers clawing into his sleeve through no conscious decision of her own. He gives her a strange look but doesn't pull away, only frees one hand to take the glass from Mister Wallace and hold it to her lips.

The first few drops strengthen her enough to lift her hand and take the glass from him, loath to be treated like a helpless patient.

When she's emptied the heavy crystal glass, Clarke feels a little bit more like herself again.

"I am so sorry for scaring you like that. I didn't have a chance to eat anything in a few hours, that must be it. Just a bit of dizziness."

Mister Wallace nods understandingly, but the other man watches her with a sceptical expression.

"Of course, of course! You've had a very long trip. I'll see if there are some leftovers from dinner in the kitchen. Mister Blake, would you be so kind as to help Miss Griffin to her room? It is right across thr hall from yours."

"Sure. Do you think you can make it up the stairs?"

Clarke nods. "I think the dizzyness has passed."

He doesn't look entirely convinced, but holds out his arm for her to lean on.

With his help, Clarke makes it up the stairs, feeling frail and ridiculous and annoyed by the fact that her keen medical mind has no idea what just happened. Her symptoms were mostly consistent with a panic attack, but she's never had one of those, and doesn't see why she should start having them now. There would have been plenty of occasions to start developing a traumatic reaction like this over the past months, but why do so now, when she's as safe and far away from all of that as possible?

Clarke can't find an answer, and her musings are interrupted when her friendly helper (and apparently, new roommate) pushes open a door and leads her into the room behind it.

And if the house was impressive from the outside, her room is _breathtaking_.

The room is big enough to comfortably house a massive antique wardrobe, a writing table and chair, a plush upholstered armchair by the window and a truly gigantic four-poster bed, complete with beautifully carved bedposts and heavy cloth canopies. Between the open fireplace, the stuccoed ceilings and elegant light blue wallpaper, Clarke suddenly feels like she stepped back in time. She half expects to find a wash-stand and chamberpot near the bed, but a closer look reveals a tapestry door beside the bed, open just wide enough for her to glimpse a small bathroom behind it.

Awestruck, Clarke steps further into the room – _her_ room, apparently.

"Are all the rooms this…"

"Grand?" Her companion is clearly amused by her reaction.

Clarke nods.

"Not all of them; that would be much too expensive to maintain. But the living quarters and communal rooms are still equipped with a lot of the original furniture."

"Holy shit." Clarke sits down on the bed, looking up at the soft blue canopy above her. "I feel like a princess."

"You'll get used to it." Tearing her eyes away from the splendour of the room, Clarke looks at her companion. Now that she's recovered from her little episode, she can take a good look at her saviour (though from what exactly she feels he saved her she couldn't tell). And there's a _lot_ to look at: There are the freckles she noticed before, harmonising perfectly with a shock of wavy brown hair and deep brown eyes, and by the time she has also taken note of a full, gently curved mouth, broad shoulders, and hands the size of dinner plates, Clarke's mouth has gone a little dry.

She's probably just dehydrated from the long trip.

"So you live here too?"

"That's right." He extends a hand. "Bellamy, resident historian."

Clarke hesitates for a moment, still shaken by what happened when she shook Dante Wallace's hand. But when she chases off the irrational fear and takes his hand, nothing happens – this handshake is only remarkable for being warm, firm, and reassuring.

"Clarke, disgraced physician."

He looks a little confused now, but he handles the information very gracefully by not reacting to it at all.

"It's a long story. I'm sorry, I'm really tired. I should just go to bed."

"An excellent idea!" Mister Wallace enters the room with a tray, piled with a plate of sandwiches and a cup of steaming tea. "But not before you've had something to eat."

Well, she's not going to argue with that, Clarke decides and sits down at the writing table to tuck in.

Mister Wallace politely but firmly sends his historian off to fetch her suitcase, which she guesses is still sitting in the driveway. She'd feel sorry that he's being bossed around on her account, but the way he's built, she guesses the suitcase won't give him any trouble - to put it bluntly, "historian" is not what she'd have guessed his profession to be.

The sandwich (cold cuts and a honey mustard sauce that she would consider killing for) restores some of Clarke's energy, and the herbal infusion Mister Wallace thoughtfully made for her calms her frayed nerves. By the time she's done and Bellamy has delivered her suitcase, she's ready to chalk the strange experience off to tiredness, go to bed, and forget all about it.

***

 

Clarke turns off her early alarm and sleeps in until noon the next day, and before she can feel bad about her lack of discipline, she reminds herself that this is what she came for: To rest, and heal, and find her balance again after... everything.

She gets dressed and goes downstairs in the hope of finding something to eat, and has tremendous success: Mister Wallace not only prepares her a delicious very late breakfast but follows it up with a tour of the house and gardens. Clarke can't seem to close her mouth as room after room of bygone splendor passes before her eyes – dusty and chuffed but so full of _history_. And Mister Wallace actually claims that she hasn't even seen the most beautiful room yet.

”Now our library, that is the real gem of the house. But at this hour, Mister Blake is usually hard at work there, and I would hate to disturb him. Should we head out to the gardens instead?“

Clarke nods, astonished at the fact that she's hanging out with someone who uses the word garden in the plural – until she actually sees the "gardens" in question.

There's a walled-in kitchen garden right off the pantry, with herbs and vegetables growing in neat rows, that apparently goes back to Victorian times.

“The garden's an awful lot of work, but two young men from the village come in and help me in exchange for a little plot of their own.” He points to a corner of the gardens that, in addition to several kitchen herbs, sports a few plants that look suspiciously like weed. “I'm not sure just what they plant there, but I've decided it's best not to ask.”

Clarke thinks he's probably right about that.

Then there's the main garden, a beautifully manicured lawn with accurate rows of hedges and flowerbeds leading down from the terrace. And behind that lies what Mister Wallace calls the “English garden” but which to Clarke looks more like an actual park; all sloping meadows and ancient trees and a gurgling little stream in the distance. It's breathtaking, and Clarke could hug the old man when he announces:

“Of course, you are free to roam the gardens at your own leisure whenever you feel like it. And if, by any chance, you paint, there are some excellent spots for that too.”

Clarke's heart aches at the suggestion – she hasn't painted in years, having found it impossible to find the time or the inspiration. Perhaps that, too, is something she should change.

“I used to paint, but I haven't done it in ages and I don't have any supplies with me. But thank you for the idea – I should buy some in town.”

“You absolutely should! For now, I would be happy to help you out with some of my own supplies.”

Looking at the kind, friendly man beside her, Clarke can't believe her luck. Who would have thought she wouldn't just find a job and a place to live here but such a wonderful landlord too?

“Mister Wallace, I can't thank you enough for your kindness. This place is so beautiful, and I actually get to live here.”

It was a much-appreciated offer when her Head of department at the hospital said that his father rented out rooms and would be happy to help her out, but Clarke mainly took it because she couldn't find any other place in town and would have had to commute to work. She had no idea that _this_ is what she'd be getting.

“Oh please, Miss Griffin, it's no trouble at all! I enjoy having young people living in the house once more, and renting out helps with the upkeep, if only a little.”

It only strikes Clarke now that it must cost a fortune to keep this place running, and she feels a little bad for being so judgemental about its crumbling state when she first arrived. But Mister Wallace obviously doesn't know about that, and she vows never to think, let alone say, anything bad about the house's state of repairs again.

Their tour is put to an end when Mister Wallace's cell phone rings, he excuses himself, and she's left to her own devices.

She continues her stroll through the gardens, making use of the unusually warm autumn weather to explore some more, and before Clarke knows, an hour has passed and she's getting a bit drowsy – clearly, she's not used to any sort of physical exercise anymore.

She takes a break at a particularly beautiful spot, an old stone bridge leading across the little stream, and she's barely sat down at the base of the bridge when she's already nodding off.

Unusual for a short afternoon nap, Clarke begins to dream.

She's standing at the base of that very same bridge, though there's a little less moss growing on its steps, and in her dream, Clarke isn't alone. There's a young man with her, wearing an old-fashioned costume and a hat which sits askew on his light brown hair.

And, come to think of it, Clarke in the dream isn't actually _Clarke_ : She's taller, for one thing, her hip reaching over the bridge's balustrade where Clarke's barely came up to it. She's wearing different things too – a dress, judging by the swishing sound when she walks, and something that feels uncomfortably like a corset restricting her waist. And out of the corner of her eyes, she can see reddish-blond tendrils of hair falling into her face from time to time.

But whoever she's supposed to be in her dream, she's _happy_. Deliriously so, bubbling over with exuberance when she reaches out to snatch the young man's hat and run away with it, and shrieking with mirth when he catches up with her and wrestles her to the ground to retrieve it.

It's the strangest experience, the kind of thing that only happens in dreams, and even then only rarely, but Clarke feels every emotion playing out in the little movie her subconscious has come up with. She feels like it's her own laughter soaring up into the blue sky, her own stomach clenching with anticipation and desire when the young man kisses her, gently at first and then more demandingly; her own heart feeling like it's about to burst with joy.

And aware that she hasn't felt anything like this in a very long time, Clarke decides to enjoy the peaceful scene. God knows her dreams haven't been very peaceful lately.

But although the lovers are all youthful innocence and springtime hope, spring is long past, and the day's warmth is unseasonable: summer's last desperate attempt to dazzle the world even as the sun is weakening. There's a tired tint to the golden light, and a rustle of curtains up at the house that speaks of uninvited, unsympathetic eyes watching the encounter. Clarke shivers despite the warmth, and the dream fades.

She wakes up to find her phone buzzing with a call, and by the time she's sat up and picked up her phone, the hazy images have been chased away by the present, solid and mundane as always.

And yet, even as she reports to her mother that she had an uneventful trip, that her room is comfortable and her landlord the sweetest, she can still feel tendrils of her dream tugging at her, pulling her away from the present to she knows not where.

She only realises after her mother has ended the call what she left out: her inexplicable panic attack when she arrived here, and the prickle on her back she felt earlier when she walked across the lawn, as if someone was watching her with hate in their eyes.

Clearly, she'll need to work on her many, many resolutions: Sleep more. Get more fresh air. Paint more.

Get better.

***

 

But try as she might, over the following days, things seem to get worse instead of better for Clarke.

After her little afternoon daydream, Clarke starts dreaming again the next night. But instead of the little scene she witnessed by the bridge, this dream is just a confusing swirl of images and emotions - love and fear and hatred and proud determination, all set against the backdrop of a grand old house: a chandelier-lit ballroom and dark servants' corridors, a bustling kitchen and a quiet sitting-room, elegant lords and ladies with powdered wigs and tight-laced corsets as well as hard-working kitchen-maids and stable boys... and then one image that makes her wake up with a gasp.

The last image she sees is of this very house, seen from the driveway the way she first saw it when she arrived here. But there are some differences: every window in the house is brightly lit, rather than just a handful of them; the driveway is lined with torches, and there are actual carriages parked before and inside the long, low building to the right of the house. Most striking, however, is how much  _newer_  the place looks. Not the sanitised, film-set-look of a newly-built house, no - there are chuffs and dents on the walls too, cobwebs in the corners of the windowframes. But the whole thing looks a lot more... alive than it does today.

And so, Clarke suddenly realises, did everything in the dream: every colour true to life, every detail plausible, every smile or frown genuine – every emotion taking up a seat right inside her own chest.

As the dream slowly fades, Clarke becomes aware of a few things: Her heart is racing, the blanket is tangled all around her, and she's sweating in her pyjamas despite the chill in the room. Ever the sensible person, she quickly puts on a pair of socks and wraps herself in her fluffy bathrobe. Unfortunately, the heating doesn't react to her attempts to turn it on, probably not switched on for the winter yet, and she decides that a hot drink is in order – to warm her up as much as calm her down.

But while the kitchen – which it takes her a moment to find in this maze of a house – holds a wide variety of teas, all of them probably very fine, she can't find anything with a sedative effect.

“Trouble sleeping?”

Clarke almost drops the box of tea she's holding. She recognizes the voice even as she whirls around, however: Mister Wallace's other tenant, the historian.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you. I didn't think my walk is that quiet.”

Clarke smiles, his charm already soothing her irritation at being spooked like this.

“I couldn't tell, to be honest – I was pretty out of it. Trouble sleeping, like you said.”

“It's probably just the new bed.”

She'd guess the same thing, but the images of her dream are still clear in her mind, as are the emotions, and Clarke isn't sure this is just the new environment. Not that she'll tell that to this virtual stranger – bad enough that he's seen her lose it on their very first meeting, there's no need to tell him about the crazy dreams.

“Probably.”

“You should make some hot chocolate. I don't know where Mister Wallace gets it, but it is amazing.”

He opens a cupboard just out of Clarke's reach, holds out a tin and hands it to her.

“Milk's in the fridge.”

His nod points her in the right direction, and soon Clarke is busy preparing herself some hot chocolate.

“You want some too?”

“I wish I could, but I still have some work ahead of me. Hot chocolate is just going to make me drowsy.”

“Wow, really? I didn't know historians generally worked that late. I mean,” she smiles impishly, “it's not like your subjects are going anywhere, is it?”

“Funny.” He flashes her a grin. “No, I just happen to be a night owl.” Standing at the counter beside her, he's starting to prepare tea for himself – setting a kettle on the cast-iron stove, carefully measuring out tea leaves, and switching on a second plate for her when she struggles with the old-fashioned gas switch. They work smoothly, and within a few minutes, both are holding a steaming mug.

“If you're not headed back to bed immediately, you can come hang out in the library – there's a comfy sofa, and I've got a fire going.”

It sounds like a good offer, definitely more attractive than returning to her cold bed and unsteady sleep, and Clarke follows him up the stairs and to the door at the end of their hallway.

She remembers Mister Wallace calling the library the “true gem” of the house, but she's still in no way prepared for it when the door opens.

She had thought “library” was just an overly fancy way of calling the study, but the room before her truly deserves the name. It's at least three times as big as her bedroom, spanning the entire breadth of the house, with large  windows probably letting in heaps of natural light during the day. Now, it's lit by an actual chandelier as well as the fire blazing in a massive fireplace to her right, illuminating even the topmost shelves of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the walls.

It's easy to imagine spending hours here, curled up with a good book: There's a large table with four chairs where Bellamy has spread out his work, laptop surrounded by towering stacks of books, papers, and neatly folded letters. On the other side of the room, a sofa and two armchairs make for a cozy sitting arrangement in front of the fireplace.

Clarke makes a beeline for the sofa while Bellamy heads back to the table, and it turns out to be exactly as comfortable as she expected. Sighing, Clarke curls up against the sofa cushion and takes a sip from her cocoa, which really is divine.

But even warmed up from the fire and the hot drink, Clarke can't quite shake off the unsettling shadow of her dream, and so she yields to the temptation of having someone here to talk to.

“So what are you researching?”

He looks up from his laptop, the surprised expression on his face suggesting that he already forgot she was in the room. Clarke feels a little bad for tearing him out of his work, but he doesn't seem to mind: Once accustomed to having company, he answers in a friendly enough tone.

“A witch hanging.”

Of all the things she would have suspected – not that she knows much about what kinds of things historians are looking for in old family libraries – this is not it.

“A _witch hanging_?”

“Yes. I believe a girl was hanged for witchcraft here in 1740. There's nothing about the case in the official town records. But I've found a source that claims that accusations of witchcraft were involved, and then hushed up.”

“And that's unusual?” He puts a piece of scrap paper in the book to mark his page, then sets it aside and turns fully towards her, his voice taking on the tone and cadence of someone accustomed to lecturing in front of people.

“Very much. As far a we know, the last person hanged for witchcraft in the colonies was Martha Carrier, and that was in 1692. But the Salem trials of 1692 sparked a lot of protest, and the accused who were still incarcerated and waiting for their execution were eventually pardoned. After that, witchcraft was rarely brought forward as an accusation. But that doesn't mean people didn't still hang on to those superstitious beliefs.”

“They kept accusing people of witchcraft?”

Clarke has to admit, her interest in the topic of witch hunts has never exceeded the occasional, probably terribly inaccurate, horror movie. But Bellamy presents his dates and facts with such enthusiasm, she can't help but be drawn in, sipping her cocoa as she listens intently.

“That's my working theory, at least. Fear of witchcraft may have driven violence and influenced legal proceedings until the late 1900s.”

“And you've found a case like that?”

“My source points towards it, yes.”

“What kind of sourse?”

“A letter, or at least part of it. Unfortunately, it didn't have more useful details than a date and the name of this village. So...” he shrugs, turns up his hands in a helpless gesture, “here I am.”

“You think you'll find some sort of record here?”

“I hope I will. I've already combed through the church records, and I've found a few women whose births were recorded, but not their marriages or deaths. But of course, they could simply have moved away... So I need to find some other evidence, perhaps even a name.”

Incredulous, Clarke lets her eyes rove over the towering stacks of books, letters, and other documents.

“That sounds like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“It is. But someone's got to do it.”

Clarke nods, starting to get a bit sleepy now that the cocoa is kicking in – then stops as a thought occurs to her.

“Why? I mean, there must be tons of records about witch trials. This one can't be much different, can it?”

“Well, like I said, the great witch craze - Salem and such - had already passed by then, so anyone killed for accusations of witchcraft at this point is a noteworthy case. But even if this girl is just one in a long line of women who were killed for other people's superstitions, she still deserves to have her story told.”

He says it with quiet determination, but there's a flash of anger in his eyes at this unknown girl's cruel fate, and Clarke feels something warm and bright flare inside her. She quickly lifts her mug and drains the last of her tea and, just for good measure, gets to her feet immediately after.

“Well, I wish you good luck with that. I'll try and get back to sleep now, but,” she pauses by the door to look back at him, little more than a mop of tousled hair and a pair of dark eyes peeking out above the wall of books, “tell me if you ever find out what happened. I'd like to hear her story.”

The moment her head hits the pillow, Clarke is out like a light – and this time, everything stays quiet.

 

 


	2. November

_November_

After one excessively relaxing week of unpacking and strolling through the park and reading in the library with Bellamy (it's a communal space, there's absolutely no reason why she shouldn't use it), Clarke feels somewhat rested.

Still, when she approaches the hospital, Clarke is nervous, and it's not just apprehension about starting a new job, meeting her new co-workers and such. Too clearly does she remember the last morning she went to work at a hospital, how she went in with the hope and determination she tried to muster every morning and came out eighteen hours later with her career in ruins and the word "murderer" hanging over her head.

But that's all been cleared up, she reminds herself with a deep breath. She's been absolved, and no matter what people might have said about her before, she's a doctor, and she's here to help.

Another deep breath and Clarke steps through the glass doors and walks up to the reception.

Her first day is as uneventful as can be: Her co-workers are nice and welcoming and willing to explain all the unfamiliar terms and processes to her, and the patients she gets assigned to are all pretty straightforward cases. It also helps that she already knows her Head of Department: Cage Wallace is her landlord's son and has been by for dinner last week, and while she wouldn't exactly consider him the most likeable person, he's polite enough - and most importantly, he took a chance on her when no one else would. To be honest, she can't even say what, precisely she dislikes about him apart from the fact that he dresses like a grown-up frat boy, but there's just... something there that gives her a bad feeling about him.

But her irrational feeling aside, there's no reason why she shouldn't get on well with Wallace junior, and all in all, Clarke returns to the manor that evening more hopeful than she's been in months.

The only thing that puts a slight damper on her mood in the evening is that Bellamy isn't there when she enters the library, and neither is his laptop. She's not sure why this disappoints her so much, though she's sure her friends would have explanations: Wells in his best psychology mode would tell her that her evenings with Bellamy have come to provide some much-needed stability, whereas Raven would laugh and say "You just think he's hot", and she doesn't want to admit that both are probably at least a little bit right.

Having the library to herself may be for the best though, because her phone is blowing up with calls, her mother and friends all eager to hear about her first day.

There's such relief and joy in their voices when she tells them that her first day went well that Clarke is hit with a sudden burst of homesickness. But that's easily ignored - after all, she'll be too busy to feel homesick come tomorrow, and she'll be home again for Christmas if her schedule allows it.

Not much later, Clarke goes to bed buoyed by her return to being a productive member of society and warmed by the fact that she's got people back home rooting for her from the other side of the country. To cap off her very successful first day, her sleep is uninterrupted and restful, and when the next few nights remain as uneventful, Clarke decides that it really was just exhaustion behind her first evening and the successive strange dreams.

The first half of November passes quietly in that same vein, Clarke's life narrowing down to work and quiet evenings in the library. She gets more reading done than she has in years, and even starts spending her evenings at the library when Bellamy isn't there, due to meetings with his thesis supervisor and other duties that take him out of town. It's a good thing that happens, she tells herself, because as much as she likes the man, he's still a barely more than an acquaintance, and Clarke has a bad habit of falling too fast for the wrong people.

And this one... oh, she can easily see herself falling for him.

Which is obviously ridiculous. They've talked a few times, exchanging family histories over hot drinks when Bellamy takes a break from his work, but she still doesn't know much about him, or he about her.

That changes one sunny Saturday in November. It's Clarke's day off, and it might be the bright sun that emboldens her or the fact that she discharged her first healthy patient the day before, but on a whim, Clarke bursts into the library and asks Bellamy if he's in the mood for a stroll into town.

She's only been there two or three times, just to get some basic necessities, but she hasn't really taken the time to look around the picturesque little village. That day, she not only sees every quaint little house and beautiful panoramic spot, but learns the history behind every single one of them. Bellamy is as enthusiastic a tour guide as he is entertaining, and the afternoon passes in a blur. They cap it off with a coffee at the town's little coffee shop, Clarke's thank you-invitation for a lovely afternoon, then head back when the sun starts to sink in the sky.

And that is apparently when Bellamy decides he's done teaching and wants to learn some things - about her.

“I'm fully aware that I'm prying, but I have to ask:  _'Disgraced physician'_?”

Clarke is confused for a moment, before she vaguely remembers saying something like that to him the night they met, still half-dazed from her strange episode.

“Oh, that. I'm sorry about that, apparently I was in the mood to overshare that night.”

“No need to apologize.” There's silence as he hesitates, then seems to give himself a push. “But if you ever feel like oversharing again, I'd be willing to listen.”

It's an offer, Clarke understands, and perhaps not a bad one. Her fresh start may have gone over smoothly, but she still sometimes flashes back to last winter, to her last patient, and wonders what on earth made her believe she was ready to return to work - or in any way suited to helping people. She tries to tell herself that these doubts are groundless, that she's a good doctor and getting back to work is the best thing for her and the patients who need her. But still the fear is there, gnawing at the back of her mind, and maybe airing out the whole terrible story will help.

And taking a deep breath, Clarke starts doing just that. She tells him about the girl she was treating last year, 14 years old and slowly wasting away. About the new medication Clarke wanted to prescribe her, experimental but cleared by the FDA, and probably the girl's only hope. And about the health insurance company who kept refusing to pay for the expensive treatment, claiming that new and unestablished medication would only be paid for as an absolute last resort.

“She kept getting worse, but her insurance kept claiming that she didn't meet the requirements for the treatment yet. She was still _too healthy_ for them.” Clarke can hear disgust dripping from her voice like acid, can still feel it pumping through her if she even thinks about it. “So I took some initiative. I made her worse.”

Bellamy stays silent for several long moments after that, taking in the enormity of what she's saying. Then he asks:

“Did it work?”

“At first, yes. She got a little worse; not much, just enough for the insurance company to finally budge and get her the medication. But it turns out it was too late – she died two weeks later.”

“Was it...”

“My fault?” Clarke laughs bitterly. “The medical committee spent two months discussing that question. They eventually ruled that her death was inevitable at this point, that she should have received that medication much earlier. Then the ethics committee spent another month debating if I was ethically right to do what I did, and by that time, the entire city was talking about it. The media, incidentally, were much quicker to decide if I killed her or not.”

She can see him swallow, but it's not clear what exactly he's moved by – is he scared of her? Disgusted? Or is he sympathetic?

“What was their verdict?”

“Well, most of them decided me being a monster made the better story, pictures and all.” She grimaces. “They were relentless. Photographers camped out in front of my apartment and the hospital, gross headlines, bikini photos taken from my facebook page – the whole shebang.”

He makes a face. “Apparently, witch-hunts are not as much a thing of the past as I thought.”

Clarke looks at him, surprised. No one's ever put it like that, oddly, but that's exactly what it was: A witch-hunt.

“So that's why you came here – to escape.”

She nods – no point denying something so obvious. “Luckily, some other scandal broke at the same time and the story never went national. The topic came up during my interviews, but your tiny little hospital was willing to value the medical panel's decision more than the public opinion. Quite the lucky break, or I probably could have kissed my career goodbye.”

And what about Bellamy's opinion, Clarke wonders - did it turn against her? But his voice and expression remain carefully neutral.

“That's good. And you enjoy working there?“

“I do!“ Overcome with relief, she tells him about her approachable colleagues and the cases she's working on – not complicated or critical ones, they don't trust her that much yet, but it's just good to be working at all – and before she's actively noticed it, they have moved on to other topics, simply leaving behind the issue of her big meltdown moment as if it could happen to anyone. And that, Clarke realises and sneaks a look at her companion, is not something she's been used to so far. On the contrary: everyone she spoke to since the incident had an opinion, very often formed based on the media's reporting and less than favourable, and the only ones who didn't immediately judge her were her friends and family.

To meet someone willing to listen to her story without judgment, without a pre-formed opinion, and to believe her fully and confidently – that is worth a lot, she realises. And in that moment, the weight that's been crushing her - of that single life she knows she took whether or not she was punished for it - that weight lifts just a little bit, and leaves room in her heart for affection to bloom.

“How about you? Doesn't it ever get lonely holed up with all those books and papers and no one else?“

He looks completely baffled by the question.

“Why would I get lonely if I have books?“

“Um, I don't know – because they're not people?“

“They were written by people.“

“Not the same thing.“ Clarke shakes her head for emphasis but doesn't really seem to get her point across.

“Why? People haven't changed that much.“

“I really, really hope that's not true.“

That launches Bellamy right into a lecture about human nature and the rise and fall of civilisations and the fact that history inevitably repeats itself, and Clarke finds herself listening with more interest than she's ever devoted to anything related to the humanities.

And it may be the crisp air or the bright autumn-coloured leaves all around them or the way Bellamy's eyes light up when he philosophises like this, but Clarke thinks that this conversation took an astonishingly pleasant turn considering it started with the darkest moment of her career. Maybe moving here wasn't just a last ditch attempt to find someplace, _any_ place to work again – maybe it was just what she needed.

***

 

Clarke's little excursion with Bellamy has the pleasant side effect of tiring her out and making it easy to fall asleep – but that doesn't stop her overactive subconsious from coming out to play at night.

This night, it has an unexpected reveal in store for her: the girl she's been dreaming about is a doctor too, in a way. At least, she's taking care of a sick child when Clarke joins her in a dream, and her calm bearing and practised movements make it clear that she's not simply caring for a sick relative but seeing to a patient - and rather competently, too.

One term's lectures on the history of medicine have long since convinced Clarke that the medical treatment of centuries past was rudimentary at best, and damaging more often than not.

But the girl doesn't prescribe bloodletting or leeches or any of the go-to remedies that often pushed patients that much closer to death. She simply applies cold wraps to the fever-ridden girl's legs to lower her temperature, then patiently makes her drink a herbal infusion prepared from what looks like chamomile, mint and verbena, all of which have anti-inflammatory properties, and none of which will kill the child.

Which, sadly, is not to say the girl actually saved her patient. There's a variety of illnesses, long since neutralised by antibiotics and vaccines, that used to take countless lives when the girl was alive, and many of them present with the same symptoms the sick child is showing in her dream.

There's a good chance the girl is fighting a losing battle here, and Clarke's heart breaks a little for her. Judging by the healer's gentleness and dedication, she cares every bit as much about her patients as Clarke herself does.

But for now, the girl has done all she can, and she knows. She leaves a little bag of her herbal infusion on the table and instructs the mother on what to do throughout the night. Then she promises to return the next day and takes her leave, emerging from the rough wooden house onto a square. Unlike the house, the square is not as easy to identify. Many of the wooden houses surrounding it have not survived the centuries, or have been significantly altered. But a few seem familiar, and by the time the girl has passed the small stone church, Clarke is sure she's standing in the middle of the same village where she visited the drugstore just this morning.

In the dream, however, the sun has just sunk, and the square is already almost wrapped in darkness. Without street lights, shop signs and electric lighting, there's nothing but a few modest candles flickering behind windows to illuminate the scene, but the girl knows her way around the village even in the dark.

With quick, determined steps, she soon leaves the village behind, walking through the woods in the direction of the Wallace estate. At least, Clarke thinks that's the direction, and after walking for some time, she does indeed arrive at the familiar iron gate. Instead of entering the estate, however, the girl follows a path alongside the garden wall until she emerges onto a small clearing, a humble wooden cabin sitting in the middle of it.

Guided by the candlelight that shines through the small windows, the girl slips into the cabin. Locking the door behind her, hanging her cloak on a hook near the door, setting her bag on the table by the window to replenish it from the jars and bags of herbs stored there: Her automatic movements tell Clarke that this is what she does every evening – this cabin is her home.

And apparently, she does not live alone, Clarke notices when she looks around the room: In a rocking-chair before the fireplace sits an old woman, snoring softly. A warm wave of affection tells Clarke that the girl and the old woman are on good terms, probably related – grandmother and granddaughter, perhaps. But, as Clarke knows well enough from her experience, familial love doesn't automatically equal familial peace, and she's reminded of that when the old woman wakes up and addresses the girl.

"Out with Master Thomas again?"

The girl interrupts her task of cutting up fresh herbs only for a second, then carries on without so much as a word in reply – clearly, the accusatory tone to the old woman's voice doesn't agree with her. She remains stubbornly silent instead of disclosing what she was really doing, but the old woman carries on unfazed.

"You know I've never said a word against your friendship with the young Master. But you're not children anymore, and folks in the village are starting to talk."

The girl laughs brightly.

"People have always talked about us, Grandmama, and you've never paid them any mind."

"And I'll not start now. But old Master Wallace will, and he'll put an end to it one way or another." She lowers her knitting. "Mark my words, child: They'll let us have our way as long as it costs them nothing. But if they fear you're after what's theirs..."

A hint of unease clouds Clarke's vision, a sign that the girl isn't quite as unconcerned as she wants to be. But her optimism holds fast.

"I do not want anything of Master Wallace's."

"Except to take his most prized possession - his heir."

"Thomas is not a possession. He's a person."

"And I am not sure Master Wallace considers those mutually exclusive."

Now there's anger, hot and righteous and probably useless, Clarke is afraid.

"Well, Master Wallace can think whatever he wants, but Thomas comes of age next spring and then he'll be free to marry me no matter what his father says."

"And if it comes to that, I'll wish you nothing but the best. But until then, I wish you would be more careful not to draw Master Wallace's attention. I dare say he plans to give away his son's hand for a lot more than you can afford."

The girl's hands grind the pestle so hard against the mortar Clarke can feel the strain of it in her bones.

"I can't listen to you speak of him in this way. He's no one else's to give, and Master Wallace will have to accept that. I'll not be chased off!"

The grandmother's sigh echoes Clarke's thoughts, but her feelings are all the girl's: a storm of fierce love and determination and helpless rage at those more powerful than her.

Before the old woman can say anything else, the girl has pushed open the door and rushed out into the darkening evening, breathing in deep, shuddering breaths and angrily kicking stones in a helpless attempt to vent that great anger inside her.

And Clarke feels for her, roots for her too, but she has a bad feeling that this is a fight the girl can't win.

On that note Clarke wakes again, uneasy and filled with worry about the unknown girl's fate.

Then she blinks, remembers who and where and _when_ she is, and laughs out loud. She's getting way too invested in the fate of a nameless girl her subconscious has dreamed up, no doubt inspired by its lofty surroundings, worrying about her as if the stakes were real. As if the _girl_ was real.

"Ridiculous," she mutters to herself, then throws off the covers and climbs out of bed to get ready for the day. She has enough on her plate without worrying about the little period drama playing out inside her dreams, as weirdly entertaining as it might be.

By the time she gets back home in the evening, Clarke has almost forgotten about the dream. She has spent most of the day struggling with the stupid insurance forms, even though they're not that different from the ones at her old hospital. And while she's never been a fan of paperwork, she's never had  _that_  much trouble with it. But now, no matter how careful she is, something doesn't work out. And when she goes back and checks some of last week's patient files, she only ends up finding the same kind of irregularities on several other forms. It's a mystery to her, and even Maya, the incredibly patient nurse who's trying to help her make sense of the mountain of paperwork, can't figure out what she did wrong. But the fact remains: some of her unlucky patients are denied their medicine, and Clarke can't do anything about it.

She returns in a dark mood, with a panicked part of her hysterically trying to convince her that this is just like the last time, that people will die again and it will be her fault _again_ and she's a monster after all, and it takes every bit of her remaining strength to fight that terrible, hateful voice.

All day, Clarke has been looking forward to finishing her book at the library, curled up in what has by now become her usual spot on the sofa, with the fire crackling behind her and Bellamy quietly working at the table. But now, it feels like she doesn't deserve that kind of peace.

She heads straight to bed instead.

***

 

That night, the praying starts. And she's not asleep when it does.

Having not set foot inside a church since last Christmas, it takes her a while to identify it as praying. But as soon as the voice has finished chanting one prayer, they start another, and Clarke actually recognizes this one:

“ _The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."_

The voice itself is pleasant enough, the girl's by now familiar voice, warm and bright, with a steadiness that tells Clarke how much inner strength the believer draws from the ancient words. And they are of course very comforting; fortifying even. _I will fear no evil –_ there's something inspiring in that kind of absolute trust, and over the past year, Clarke has often wished she was religious, just to have that kind of deep belief in a higher power protectively holding their hand over her.

 _"T_ _hou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.“_

Of course, her mother has always taught her to rely on herself for strength and sustenance, moral and material. But in that moment, when her own store of moral fortitude feels a little drained, Clarke envies the girl in her head for being able to turn to someone else with her sorrows and find comfort in them.

Oddly enough, as Clarke listens, she's starting to feel the calming effect of the prayer herself, that sense that, should she ever be in trouble, someone will be there to help her.

It's the strangest thing, but by the time she's made it through three or four repetitions of the psalm, Clarke falls asleep, physically exhausted but calmer than she was before. Although she still hopes that, come morning, the aural apparition will have stopped.

It hasn't.

It's not there all the time, luckily, just when it's quiet and she's not busy thinking or saying or doing anything in particular. But it's still _there_ , and in Clarke's book, hearing anything inside her head other than her own voice is a bad thing.

It doesn't help that it gets louder and more persistent when she returns home in the evening. Resigned not to panic just yet, Clarke prepares herself some warm milk with a shot of sweet liqueur she finds in a kitchen cabinet, hoping it will knock her out and vowing to get her hands on some sleep medication if it doesn't.

She sleeps, mercifully, but the praying persists, and by the end of the week Clarke is halfway through the book of psalms and consumed by the paranoid fear that she's going insane. Which, she thinks, everyone in her position would be, really.

To make matters worse, Maya has come back with an apologetic expression and asked her to check her new patient forms once more, and Clarke feels like the rug is being pulled out from under her feet. This was supposed to be her beautiful new beginning, and now it's spoiled by whatever delayed reaction to the stress of the past year is fuelling this slow, grinding mental breakdown.

She tries to hold on to her sanity with everything she's got: She calls Wells and begs him to run a (somewhat unethical) off-the-cuff diagnosis of her mental state. She describing her exact symptoms in detail, and almost starts crying with relief when he tells her he finds it unlikely that she's suddenly developing schizophrenia.

There are other possible reasons for the voices and the distractedness of course, and these too she pursues: She collects water samples from the house's taps and sends them in to a laboratory to have them tested for contaminations, and even talks Jasper the lab technician into running a full blood test on her. (Well, not so much talks him into it as threatens to expose his little weed farm at the mansion, which gets her his swift cooperation and a promise of absolute discretion - although oddly, she trusts him to keep her less-than-stellar health to himself even without the blackmail.) Instructing Jasper to keep an eye on any signs of poisoning – lead perhaps or mercury, both of which could occur in the old house she lives in and would cause hallucinations of the kind she experiences - Clarke can't do anything but wait until the blood tests are back.

Unfortunately, waiting has never been her strong suit, and while she clings to any hope of a rational explanation, Clarke is not feeling great about her mental state. She may be the first person to ever wish for lead poisoning, and the looming prospect that her sanity may be slipping wears her down a little more each day.

When she joins Bellamy in the library a few days after the praying first starts, he notices immediately: "Are you okay?" are the first words out of his mouth right when she steps into the room, and the look of deep concern on his face makes her want to just give in and tell him everything.

But between her first evening here and disclosing the story of how she killed a patient ( _No,_ she reminds herself just like her therapist told her to, _it's not_ you _who killed her_ ), Clarke is pretty sure that eventually, Bellamy is going to draw his own conclusions about her mental state, and they're not going to be very flattering no matter how understanding he's been so far.

So she only claims to be catching some sort of bug and deftly uses the opportunity to check if he's been noticing anything unusual, anything that might be consistent with environmental poisoning. After all, if Jasper's tests reveal contaminations in the water, he'd be a victim too, and she'll drag him to the hospital if he shows as much as a single symptom. Luckily, Bellamy seems to be in perfect health and Clarke holds on tight to the secret of her hallucinations, even though she can clearly tell Bellamy isn't convinced. But he doesn't press her for more information, only makes her some calming herbal tea and practically orders her off to bed (a command Clarke had been hoping to daydream about under very different circumstances).

So Clarke goes to bed, drinks her herbal tea, and starts to pray herself: _Please, make it stop._ Let it be lead poisoning or spoiled food or mouldy walls – anything she can fight with the means at her disposal.

Relief comes from another source: After neither Jasper's blood test nor the water contamination test yield any result, Clarke at least gets some reassurance that the incorrect patient forms are not part of her hallucination.

Maya comes up to the doctors' communal desk where she's doing paperwork, a serious-looking Asian guy in tow, and declares:

“It's not you who's been filing stuff wrong. Monty just confirmed it: Someone's been tampering with these forms.“

And to her great astonishment, the guy - Monty, she assumes - starts explaining something about IT security and „invisible traces“ in altered data and Clarke doesn't really understand much but she understands this: 1) She's not completely crazy, and 2) Someone's manipulating patient files.

And she may not be able to do anything about the dreams and voices, but by God she's going to sort out those patient files.

 


	3. December

_December_

Once Clarke is busy mulling over the strange case of the doctored files with Maya and Monty, the praying fades into the back of her mind, only making itself noticeable just before she falls asleep and right after she wakes up, when her mind is still in that vulnerable in-between state. Obviously, quiet and non-disturbing hallucinations are still hallucinations and therefore not exactly a good thing, but for now, Clarke decides that she can't be that close to madness if she still manages to carry out her daily tasks and investigate insurance fraud.

But just as the praying slowly subsides, the dreams come back in full swing.

The next one happens in the afternoon again; when she's just dozed off for a well-deserved nap. Between her less-than-restful sleep, the potential shady goings-on at the hospital and helping out with a slew of holiday-related injuries at the emergency room, it's been a tough week, and the weekend finds Clarke completely knackered. She still drags herself through the cold drizzle into town to stock up on chocolate, but by the time she gets back to the house, Clarke is just about ready to go back to bed again.

Instead, she heads to the library - since she hasn't been by all week, it's only polite of her to say Hi to Bellamy, if he's even there.

He is, but he seems to be very immersed in some old book or other, so Clarke only sets down the tea she brought for him (she made one for herself anyway, why not do a nice thing for someone else too?), then curls up on the sofa with a contented sigh.

This, Clarke decides, this is how all weekends should be spent. The morning's slight drizzle has turned into sheets of sleety rain, pummeling the roof and splashing against the windows when a raging gust of wind hits them. But in here, it's warm and cosy, with the fire crackling away behind her and her feet buried under the pink fluffy blanket she bought in town. It clashes horribly with the rest of the room and Bellamy eyed it disapprovingly when she brought it in, but Clarke has decided that right now, her comfort trumps historically accurate interior design.

It doesn't take long for her eyelids to start drooping, her body catching up with the fact that it is indeed finally allowed some rest. She doesn't even notice anymore when the book slips from her grasp and falls to the floor, nor when Bellamy comes over with a soft smile to save the half-empty mug in her other hand from the same fate.

No, Clarke is already far away, or rather, long ago but in the same place she walked past this morning: the stables by the side of the house, where a narrow path provides a short cut to the village. The stables themselves are nothing but crumbling ruins now, the roof and part of the walls already collapsed and overgrown with weeds, but in her dream they're still upright and in full working condition - and currently the location for another secret rendezvous between the young lovers.

But compared to the first such meeting she witnessed, that sunny afternoon in the gardens, today the boy's face is serious, his kisses much less exuberant than before. A quick peck, then he draws back to look at the girl worriedly.

“I hear you've been visiting the Sanders family since their youngest fell ill."

"I've brought her some remedies, and broth to get up her strength. The poor thing is still weak, but God willing she'll make it through the winter."

The girl is obviously hopeful about this, relief and pride casting a glow over her that Clarke shares with pleasure. Her companion, on the other hand, seems less elated.

"I wish you would stop handing out your potions and elixirs.”

The girl just laughs. "They are not potions. They're simple household cures for everyday ailments.”

“I know. But my father is only waiting for a reason to evict you and your grandmother from the cottage. If he finds one of your household cures, he'll make a case of it.”

“They bring relief to all who imbibe them, and hurt none. Who can make a case of that?”

“Someone who feels threatened by you. Please, my love, listen to my advice – if not for your sake, then for mine, for I would surely die if you were taken from me.”

"No one is _taking_ anyone. We do not dwell in the dark ages anymore - it is the year of our Lord 1740, the time of chasing witches is long past."

He winces, turning pale at the idea.

"The time of hanging people as thieves and murderers is not, however."

"And I am neither of those things, as everyone who knows me will confirm." She gives him a quick peck on the cheek, half reassurance, half mockery. "You will simply have to find something else to worry about."

The girl laughs her fierce laugh, but her companion doesn't chime in – his fear is genuine, and Clarke wonders if he's judging the situation more realistically than the girl. After all, this is the second warning she's received and brushed off now, and while Clarke's fondness for the girl increases, so does her fear. What will fate hold in store for the young lovers?

Nothing good, she's afraid, and doesn't even notice that she has apparently come to believe that the girl and her peers are real, or rather, _were_ real, and that by continuing to have these dreams, she gets a chance to lift the veil the centuries have thrown over their lives.

And it is this belief that makes it impossible not to be engrossed in the dreams, or to draw in a gasping breath when the stable door creaks open behind them and a figure appears in the opening, no more than a black silhouette against the light behind them.

“I see you are still set on neglecting your duties to this family.”

The voice is so cold it seems to deepen the frost covering the windowpanes, so disdainful Clarke wonders what deep well of hatred is fuelling it.

But the man it belongs to looks... normal, she sees when he steps closer: Fairly average in height and build, wearing rich clothes similar to Thomas' attire - and he strongly resembles the men in the paintings of Wallace ancestors lining the manor house's corridors. In contrast her kindly landlord, however, he's only in his fifties and his hair is steely grey instead of the current Wallace patriarch's snow-white. Not to mention that there's no trace of the old man's kind smile on this Wallace's face, just cold, vicious rage.

“I have no intention of doing anything of the sort, Father.”

So this, Clarke notes interestedly, is the boy's father, the man whom everyone in her dreams so far has spoken of with a wariness bordering on fear - everyone except for the girl, that is.

“And yet here you are, sneaking about with that... trollop, against my express wishes.”

“Don't you dare speak about her like that”, Thomas protests valiantly, but his father's eyes are fixed on the girl now, and therefore on Clarke as she once again watches the scene through the girl's eyes.

“We would not have to sneak about if you would let us get married.” The girl straightens her spine, resolved to remain upright and defiant in the face of her opponent's rage, and Clarke can relate – she herself could never stand a bully either, or know when to keep her mouth shut.

“Oh, I am sure you'd like that - I see what you're after. But you'll not be part of this family, not even if my useless son gets a babe on you, so best not to try that. As for you,” he turns back towards his son, “I think you need a reminder whose word is law in this house.”

And before either of the young lovers can react, he takes a riding crop off its hook on the wall, raises it above his head, and brings it down on his son's face with precise, brutal force.

Thomas howls out in pain when the crop comes down on the side of his face, just barely missing his eye, and when the older Wallace raises his arm again, the girl jumps in front of his victim, arms lifted up to protect her face. When the crop hits her, it slices through her sleeve and leaves a trail of fire in its wake and she screams and screams, or maybe it's Clarke herself screaming because she can feel the strain of it in her own throat but she still can't seem to stop screaming and already the whip is coming down a second time and overwhelming, all-consuming pain radiates out from her arms....

And then, just as the crop is raised again to come down on her a third time, someone is shaking her by the shoulders and calling her name, and Clarke remembers that this is not her time, not her reality, that there's a way out of this horrible situation. As bad as she feels for leaving the girl alone with Wallace's wrath, she throws herself towards the voice calling her back to the present.

When she opens her eyes, she's back where she fell asleep: safe and sound in 2016, with Bellamy holding on to her shoulders and looking completely freaked out.

“Clarke! What the fuck is happening? Are you okay? You were screaming!”

Clarke lifts her hands to his arms, needing to feel the solidity of him while she looks around, taking in every detail and assuring herself that it's exactly the same as it was when she must have fallen asleep.

“I'm okay. I...” she swallows, her throat painfully dry. “I'm okay.” She's not sure who she's trying to reassure here, him or herself, but it doesn't really work anyway. “It was just a nightmare.” Just a nightmare that felt as if she was on the receiving end of that whip herself, brought down with enough force to seriously maim and injure.

A shudder runs through her, dislodging a tear out of the corner of her eye and spilling it down her face. Before she can lift her hand to wipe it away, Bellamy beats her to it. With the sleeve of his blue Henley, he gently dabs at her cheek until he notices her watching him and drops his hand, probably becoming aware of the intimacy of the gesture.

“That must have been some nightmare.”

“You know how nightmares can get sometimes.”

“I... don't, apparently. Does this happen to you a lot?”

“Not like this, no.”

He falls silent, watching her, and Clarke notices that she's still holding on to his arms. Dropping her hands, she scooches away from him on the sofa, still struggling to calm her racing heart. It's only then that she notices her hands are aching, fingers stiff as if she had balled them into tight fists, and there are crescent-marks in the skin of her palms.

With trembling hands, she picks up her half-empty cup from the side table and takes a sip of cold tea, which tastes disgusting but at least helps soothe her raw throat.

Bellamy, meanwhile, seems to have come to some kind of conclusion. “Look, Clarke, I know it's not my place but – whatever it is you're dealing with here, I think you should get help. Or at least talk to someone about it. From what you told me, you've had a rough time recently...”

“It has nothing to do with that,” Clarke snaps, even though not too long ago, she was thinking the same thing.

“Okay. Maybe it doesn't. But if this happens a lot, there's help you can get...”

“No, there isn't!” Clarke bursts out, hating the edge of hysteria in her voice but _God_ , if only things were that easy to explain. “There is no help to get with these damned dreams. I know, because I've tried everything. I've spoken to my psychologist friend about the dreams and the voices, and I've had the water tested and I've done a blood test and every check-up I could get at the hospital and still... nothing. It just won't stop.”

“What won't stop? What voices?” His voice is flat now, wary, and Clarke steels herself for the moment he'll decide that she's crazy after all.

But she's started talking about it now, she might as well get it all out.

"I think I'm being haunted. I keep having those dreams, about a girl who lived here in the 18th century, and in the dreams I'm her. I see what she sees, feel what she feels. She's in love, you know, with a young son of the Wallace family – Thomas – but his father objects. And today... or, on some day 275 years ago, he beat them up with a riding crop. That's why I screamed, because I could feel every hit of that crop as if it was hitting my own skin. That's how realistic those dreams are. And I think she was real. She was real, and something terrible happened to her, and she's trying to tell me about it. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do to about it."

She takes a deep breath and another sip of tea, but she doesn't look at Bellamy. He was here when she was in that horrible, painful dream, and she wants him to continue to be here but she has a feeling he'll walk out on her any moment now, or call the cops and have her committed, and she doesn't want to see his face when he decides to do so.

"And there are voices, or rather, there's one voice. It belongs to the girl I dream of, and I even hear it when I'm awake. She...” Clarke laughs involuntarily, finding it hard to believe that this is actually happening, that she's actually telling another person about it. “She prays. Psalms, mostly. I think it gives her courage, and sometimes it helps me too.”

He hasn't said anything, which is strange, but she's not quite done yet.

“I know it sounds crazy, but like I said, I've examined every other possible reason, and none of them were behind it. So, that's it. I've never even believed in ghosts, and now I'm being haunted.”

"I believe you." The words are quiet but steady, and it takes her a moment to catch up with them.

“And you don't have to feel like... wait, what?”

"I said, I believe you. About the dreams. About the girl and her story. About the idea that she was real. Because I think she was, too. And I _know_ someone who was."

With that, he gets up, walks over to his desk and starts excitedly rummaging around. Curious, Clarke follows him, watching as he locates what he's been searching for: a big, leather-bound book. It looks old, all chuffed corners and frayed edges, and Bellamy handles it with the utmost care, his big hands turning the fragile pages with surprising delicacy.

Then he lets out a triumphant "Ha!" and points to a particular line on one of the yellowing pages.

"I knew it!" The spindly writing is faded and hard to decipher, but she can clearly make out the name Thomas and a date: 1720. "See, back in 1720 the Wallace family had a son called Thomas - a common enough name, yes, but the strange thing is that it was never passed on. Usually, families would have a few names they would pass on down the line, but there was only ever one Thomas, and the name seems to have died out with him. And - and this is the second strange thing - I can't actually find a record of his death, or of any events in his life other than his birth, baptism, and confirmation."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, they definitely would have recorded his birth – he was the oldest son, heir to the estate. And that makes it even stranger that we never find out what happened to him. There's no record of his death, or of anything happening later than his tenth birthday - no marriage, no children, nothing. He just.... disappeared."

"That's weird."

"Very," Bellamy confirms, but while Clarke feels a creeping sense of terror at the discovery of the family's lost son, Bellamy looks like he's solving a particularly entertaining puzzle - which, from his perspective, is probably exactly what's happening.

“Of course, there might be something...“ He pauses where he stands for a moment, staring off into the air, then abruptly starts walking towards the door.

“Where are you going?“

“Upstairs.“

“What's upstairs?“

Already by the door, he turns to flash her an excited grin.

“Everything.“

With that, he practically bounces out the door, down the hallway to the stairs, and Clarke doesn't think she has a choice but to follow him.

She's never been on the second floor, but that's not his destination in any case: He heads straight to a door at the end of the corridor and opens it to reveal more stairs behind it – an attic.

“I didn't know this house had an attic.”

“Sure it did. This one used to be the lumber room, the place where they stored stuff they didn't need at the moment – furniture, mostly. But over the years other things have migrated up here too - tableware, linens, old clothes, books, papers, toys, keepsakes... It's a treasure trove.”

Clarke follows him up the stairs, amused by his enthusiasm and fairly steady on her legs again by now. Bellamy really is acting like they're on some sort of treasure hunt, and frankly, it's adorable.

When she reaches the top of the steep stairs and looks around, Clarke is glad to have Bellamy with her because otherwise this place would creep her out. Several large pieces of furniture are scattered about the large space, covered with sheets to create strange, ghostly figures. In between are all the odds and ends cluttering any family's attic, she supposes, except there are much more of them, and much older ones - a chuffed rocking horse here, an old doll sitting on an old box there...

But Bellamy moves around the extraordinary objects as if they were no more exciting than the brooms and buckets in a cleaning cupboard.

Looking reassuringly like he's able to make sense of the chaos, Bellamy steers straight towards an old wooden chest in the far corner of the room, drags it under one of the slanted ceiling windows, and carefully opens it to reveal... more papers.

“If there's anything more to find about him, this is where we'll find it.”

“How?”

“Well, if he ever got involved with running the estate, either before or after his father's death, there might be records of that: ledgers or contracts written or signed by him, possibly mentions of him in other local families' dealings... We might find some of these documents here, or at the archive in town.”

Clarke steps closer and reaches out to take the topmost document, a certificate of some kind, only to be stopped by Bellamy's hand around her wrist.

“Careful. They're very fragile.” He reaches for a plastic bagsitting next to the box and roots around in it, still holding on to her wrist as if he didn't trust her to keep her hands to herself. Not that she minds – on the contrary: Due to her pushed-up sleeves, his hand is directly on her skin, and his grip is not nearly tight enough to hurt – just tight enough to make her heart beat a little faster.

He turns back around and holds something out: a white rag - no, a pair of white cotton gloves.

"If you're going to touch the documents, put these on. And handle them very, very carefully. Like, open heart surgery carefully."

Clarke smiles, then takes the gloves and slips them on. Bellamy lets go of her wrist to do the same, then hands her the topmost pile of documents.

"Alright, spread these out on the floor. If you can find a date, sort them by it. If not, put the undated ones in a separate row."

Clarke does as she is told, trusting that Bellamy's orders will help them establish order.

They soon fall into a smooth rhythm of shared work: Clarke lays out the documents, sorted by date, then Bellamy looks over everything and rearranges the papers according to some other system.

They work like this for a while, with no sounds in the room except for the patter of rain on the roof and the occasional rustle of papers being moved around, and Clarke feels peace settle over her. Peace, and optimism: for the first time since this whole strange episode started, she thinks she might be able to get the bottom of it.

And she doesn't have to do it alone.

***

 

They spend the better part of the afternoon up in the attic, quietly and methodically sorting papers until it starts to get dark outside and the temperature in the already chilly room drops even further.

Reluctantly, they decide to call it a day and head downstairs to the kitchen for dinner and a much-needed hot drink.

Settling in at the old kitchen table, Clarke tries not to be disappointed that they haven't found anything yet. But, as Bellamy explains while he fixes them some scrambled eggs with the automatic ease of someone who's been cooking for himself for a long time, Bellamy's been spending months sorting the family's more recent papers and records, and those were in fairly good order.

"Those older ones though - I wasn't supposed to deal with those for weeks - they're in much worse order."

Now Clarke feels a little guilty for keeping him from his work. But when she says as much, Bellamy only shrugs and piles her plate with scrambled eggs.

"To be honest, I'm actually happy about the distraction. The Wallaces were staunch prohibitionists, so during the early 20th century where I'm currently stuck, they were terribly boring." He flashes her a grin. "Maybe their ancestors at least knew how to stir things up."

Clarke can't help but laugh, even though there's no doubt about it: Bellamy makes the dorkiest jokes she's ever heard. He just makes them very very charmingly.

"Besides, it's nice to be reminded that there were actual people writing all those boring papers. And yes," he quickly says when she raises an eyebrow, "a lot of them are boring, even to me. I'd love to get my hands on a juicy personal diary, or a bunch of private letters.... But your story was just as good. Maybe even better."

Clarke smiles but returns her attention to her scrambled eggs, not sure how to reply.

"I'm sorry, that sounded pretty callous... It's a bit more than a story to you, after all."

He looks contrite now, but Clarke doesn't think there's anything to apologise about.

"I don't know, maybe it helps to look at it like a story - my own private soap opera, costumes and all!"

"World exclusive screening," he laughs and Clarke gleefully joins in. After weeks of panic, joking about the stupid dreams is incredibly freeing. Not to mention that, unlike her, Bellamy seems to consider them a gift rather than a curse.

"So hit me with the next installment then - what else can you tell me about your girl and my missing Thomas?"

"Why are you even sure he's _your_ Thomas?"

"Well, the time-frame fits. And if he was indeed involved in an unsuitable love affair, we might have found the reason he disappears from the family records - perhaps he was disowned. Which, given that his father had no other male heirs, seems a rather extreme step to take, but not unheard of."

Clarke nods. She doesn't know anything about history, but Bellamy's theory sounds plausible, or as close to plausible as they're going to get when there may be actual haunting involved.

So she recalls her dreams and tells him more about them, including every detail she can remember - what the persons in them were wearing, how they were speaking, what they were doing...

Bellamy listens with rapt attention, getting excited and fidgety whenever she mentions something he recognises. When she finally runs out of things to report, he looks at her for a moment as if he was seeing a miracle manifest itself before him (which is definitely a nice way to be looked at), then chuckles incredulously.

"And you really didn't know anything about the Wallaces before? Or about life in the 18th century?"

"Nothing about the Wallaces, and only the kind of stuff about the period you learn in school. But obviously that's been a while, plus I spent most of my history lessons doodling anyway."

"What about movies - watch any period movies recently?"

Clarke shakes her head. "I haven't watched a movie in ages. And I usually prefer modern stuff - crime, action, that sort of thing." She shrugs apologetically. "Not a big history fan."

Although, she thinks with a look at Bellamy, with dust clinging to his dark curls and excitement shining in his eyes, that could be about to change.

"In that case, there's absolutely no explanation for the level of detail in your dreams."

No explanation except for one, the sudden silence in the room seems to say, and Clarke finds herself a little dumbstruck by what she's slowly coming to accept: The dreams are real, somehow. Someone is sending her glimpses from the past. And that someone, she's sure of it now, is the girl starring front and center in her dreams.

And, she realises and isn't as freaked out as she probably should be, she's come to care deeply about the girl's fate, and the fate of her sweet, fierce, probably doomed love.

Which makes it feel like a terrible betrayal when the dreams and visions turn into a physical, malicious haunting.

***

 

It starts a few days after she first tells Bellamy about the haunting. Her new partner in history investigation has been going to the attic every day to continue sorting the records, but Clarke has only been able to join him once, because her workload seems to have suddenly doubled. It probably only feels like it because Cage Wallace has changed the system by which he determines their shifts, but either way her schedule has been hell this week. She barely gets around to eating, sleeping and showering, and she hasn't really made much progress on the manipulated files at the hospital either.

All she managed was to have lunch with Cage once and ask him about how exactly the files are processed at their department - perhaps there's some detail she missed that would clear everything up? But everything seems to be done the same way it was at her old hospital, and Cage's answers do nothing to dispel her suspicions.

To make matters worse, one day later Cage tells her she'll have to work both at Christmas and New Year's – well, he asks her if she'd be willing to volunteer, but the question is voiced in a way that makes it very clear what is expected. Clarke isn't overly hung up on Christmas, but she was looking forward to flying home and seeing her mom and her friends again, and when she gets home that night, on her first free evening of the week, she's feeling a little dejected.

But she has a mission, and she's not going to let Cage Wallace keep her from fulfilling it. Not to mention, Bellamy's been hard at work trying to identify her ghost. It's the least she can do to help him. So she heads straight up to the attic, expecting to find Bellamy there.

To her surprise, the room is empty, and almost dark already even though outside, the winter sun is just setting.

She calls out anyway, rather irrationally, and walks forward into the depths of the room, her footsteps echoing in the empty silence.

"Bellamy?"

There's a soft rustle behind her, a creak as if from a step on the old wooden floor. But when she turns around, there's no sign of Bellamy, or anyone else - nothing but the dust she's stirred up, floating through the streaks of wan evening light still falling in through the windows above her.

She heads back to the chest of papers, trying to gauge the process Bellamy has made in her absence, when there's another creak behind her.

As her heartbeat picks up the pace and cold fingers crawl up her spine, Clarke turns around - just in time to see a huge white shape descend towards her.

She throws herself behind the chest of documents just in time: a second after she hits the floor, there's an almighty crash, and the big white shape lands on the lid of the wooden chest, just inches above her head.

There's silence except for her harsh breaths for a few heartbeats. Then Clarke yanks at the edge of the white cloth dangling down from the object above her and pulls it off to reveal the wooden frame of a bookcase.

She lets out the breath she's been holding in a short, choked laugh. Not a ghost then.

Clarke rolls out from under the bookcase but otherwise stays on her back on the dusty floor, just looking up at the massive piece of furniture and waiting for her heart to slow down. Taller than her by far and made of massive wood, the bookcase looks heavy, and would no doubt have injured her severely had it come down on her head.

"Clarke? Is that you?“ That's Bellamy's voice, and a second later he appears in her line of vision, bending over her with an old-fashioned gas lamp. “What happened?

“Some old bookcase fell over. Don't worry, it didn't hit me. I'm fine.”

He nods curtly, then holds out a hand to help her up, effortlessly lifting her to her feet. But being suddenly upright again makes her a little woozy, and Clarke quickly throws out a hand to steady herself on the nearest solid surface – Bellamy's sweater-clad chest.

“You sure you're okay?” Bellamy's voice is soft and worried, and when she looks up, his face is much closer than she's used to. His freckles are standing out starkly in the dim light, his eyes so dark they're almost black. She can feel the solid muscle under her fingertips when her hand flexes involuntarily, and Clarke swallows hard.

“Yes,” she breathes, and only when she hears the breathy sound does she manage to regain some of her composure, drop her hand and take a step back. “I'm fine. Just dizzy. So, have you made any progress here?”

His face falls.

“Not really. There's some correspondence about buying a pony for Thomas, but it doesn't really help answer any of our questions.”

Clarke nods and tries not to look disappointed. He's been working his ass off on this just to help her – she's not going to make him feel bad about not finding anything.

“I'm sorry I couldn't be more help – my schedule's been hell this week.”

“Don't worry about it – I've still made a lot of progress sorting papers, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. We'll find something eventually.”

With that, they return to work in the flickering light of the gas lamp, although Clarke can't seem to focus entirely on the papers Bellamy hands her. Not when his hands brush hers every time he does and make her stomach do an annoying little twisty thing, or when he smiles gratefully when she hands them back, or when she catches him shooting her concerned looks every once in a while, as if trying to check that she really is okay.

It's a relief and a welcome distraction when he strikes up a conversation.

"So, what are your plans for Christmas?"

"I don't have any."

His head snaps around as he looks at her. "What?"

"I have to work. Christmas Eve, Christmas, and New Years." She shrugs. "Apparently as the newest member I get the short straw when it comes to unpopular shifts."

"That's horrible! They couldn't let you have at least _one_ day?"

Clarke smiles, endeared by how affronted he is on her behalf.

"They all have families they want to celebrate with. I don't, at least not here. To be honest, it's not that bad - my Mom wants to celebrate Christmas with her new boyfriend for the first time since my Dad died. It probably would have been terribly awkward."

"I know the feeling." He sounds like he means it, and Clarke waits for him to elaborate. "My sister moved in with her boyfriend this year, so we're celebrating Christmas at their place." He pulls a grimace, and Clarke laughs.

“I take it you're not crazy about that plan.”

“No, not at all.”

“Bad choice of boyfriend?”

He rolls his eyes, but then contemplates for a moment. “Not really, if I'm perfectly honest. He seems to be a pretty good guy, it's just weird to see her settle down. I've looked after her for most of my life, and now suddenly I don't have to anymore – she's making her own decisions, doing her own thing. Buying her own Christmas tree, for Christ's sake!” But there's a hint of pride in his little rant. He's mentioned his sister before, told her a little bit about raising her alone from the age of thirteen when their mother died, and it warms her heart to hear they're still so close – annoying big brother antics included.

“I assume the boyfriend is helping with the Christmas-tree-buying.”

“He better be.”

“You can always bring a spare one, just in case. I'm sure they'd appreciate it.”

“Oh yes, that'll go over great!” They both chuckle, but it's not long before Bellamy gets serious again.

“So there'll be no Christmas at all for you?”

“Well, Maya and her boyfriend Jasper, who both work at the hospital, have put up some decorations and everyone who has to work is pitching in to bring something Christmas-y for the day itself – cookies and punch, that sort of thing. But mostly, it will be business as usual.”

“Business as.... Are you going to do _anything_ Christmas-related at all?“

Clarke shrugs, stifling a smile at his outraged tone. “Probably not.“

“Alright, that's it.“ He gets to his feet, energetically dusts off his hands on his jeans. “We're baking cookies.“

“We are?“ Clarke asks, surprised.

“Yes. We're going to get you at least a little bit into the Christmas spirit.”

Clarke isn't sure how exactly she's going to get into the Christmas spirit now when she hasn't managed to do so for the first half of December. But Bellamy is already starting to carefully put away the documents they've worked on, and when Clarke gets to her feet and stretches, she notices how cramped her back is from sitting hunched over the papers all evening. Maybe a little break won't hurt her.

Plus, she never would have guessed Bellamy would be such a huge Christmas fan, but now that she's seeing his determination to bring her some holiday cheer, she finds it adorable. Cookies it is, then.

Ten minutes later, Bellamy is ordering her around the kitchen as they prepare the cookie dough. He's put some Christmas music on on his phone and found a candle to light somewhere, and with the oven already preheating, the kitchen is warm and bright and Clarke has to admit she does feel a lot more Christmas-y than before.

"So what turned you into such a Christmas fanatic?"

He considers for a moment. "Defiance, I guess."

Clarke's surprise must have shown on her face, because he chuckles and elaborates.

"When I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of money - or any money, really. But my Mom always made sure we'd have a great Christmas. She'd work extra hours on top of her extra hours for months before just so she could afford it. And after she died, O and I sort of continued the tradition."

"She raised you alone?"

He nods. "She didn't have much luck with her men, or in general. But she worked her ass of for us, made us work hard in school too. I hope our Christmases were for her as much as they were for us."

He suddenly laughs, bringing a hand up to rub the back of his neck nervously.

"I'm sorry, you didn't ask for my entire family history."

She shrugs. "I don't mind. Your mom sounds pretty badass."

He smiles fondly. "She was. She didn't always make the best decisions, and she placed way too much responsibility on my shoulders - I only understood that in hindsight. But she really loved us."

"You had to help out a lot?"

"I practically raised my sister alone. And I can't blame my mother, not when she was working three jobs just to keep us fed and clothed. But she used to tell me 'Your sister, your responsibility' when I was way too young for any such responsibility."

"How old were you?"

"Six when Octavia was born."

"That's a fucked-up thing to say to a six-year-old child."

He shrugs. "I didn't know that back then; and it's taken me some time to understand. But hey," he grins crookedly, "O and I both came out of it okay."

She understands the hint: He doesn't really want to talk about it anymore. And while Clarke may not be able to imagine what his childhood was like, she can relate to this, to being exasperated, maybe even angry at a parent and loving them regardless.

But they set out to bake cookies and get into the Christmas spirit, not swap sad childhood stories.

And that's exactly what they do. With cheesy Christmas music warbling in the background, they try to outdo each other by cutting out ever more ridiculous shapes. Clarke really impresses Bellamy by etching little Rudolphs into the cookies. And Bellamy makes her feel warm and giddy just by being here – and once, threatens to make her spontaneously implode by standing very close behind her to peer over her shoulder as she works.

All in all, it's a very successful evening, which ends only when her eyes are starting to droop and Bellamy laughs and sends her off to bed with a promise that he'll take the cookies out of the oven. By that time, she's just tipsy enough for a bold move: She walks up to Bellamy, stretches up, and presses a kiss to his cheek, lingering long enough for the contact to be just this side of casual and much too short at the same time.

“Thank you, Bellamy. I've had a lovely evening.”

Bellamy looks a little dumbstruck. “You're welcome.”

Then he smiles, brighter than ever, and Clarke practically floats up the stairs.

But while Clarke goes to bed filled from head to toe with a warmth that is only partly because of the mulled wine Bellamy made, she wakes up shivering with cold.

For a few disoriented moments, she tries to battle the sudden cold by simply pulling up her blanket. But that does nothing at all to stop the icy air wafting across the room and penetrating her cocoon of warmth, and eventually, Clarke throws back the blanket and switches on the light to investigate.

She doesn't have to search long for the source of the sudden temperature drop: Her window isn't just cracked like she always leaves it when she sleeps – it's wide open, and so is the one next to it.

And, Clarke realises when she follows the direction of the draft through her room and turns around, so is her door.

The shiver wracking her isn't entirely due to the cold.

While it's easy to imagine that she failed to properly close one window when she aired out the room earlier, it seems highly implausible that the same thing happened to both windows and the door, and Clarke suddenly feels very exposed in her room, as if someone had ripped away the safety of the walls around her.

Someone – or some _thing_?

The thought wouldn't have occurred to her just a few weeks ago, but she is now officially living with a ghost. What if it turned against her, for some reason? That's what happens in the movies, isn't it?

For just a fraction of a second, Clarke is tempted to march straight across the hall and knock on Bellamy's door. There's a friendly person over there, in possession of a warm bed and a pair of strong arms (presumably), and she's alone and freezing and a little freaked out.

But this isn't a movie, and she's not a damsel in distress.

Clarke shuts the door firmly and listens for the lock to click, then walks over and does the same with the windows, checking and double-checking that they're really closed and then drawing the curtains closed for good measure too.

Then she puts on a pair of warm fuzzy socks and a sweater over her pyjama top and climbs back into bed.

  
***

 

Clarke spends the next day staving off a sore throat and trying not to overthink what happened – which is easier said than done, especially when she returns to find her room in disarray: Her bedside lamp is knocked over, her clothes torn out of the suitcase and strewn about the room, and her favourite red lipstick has been used to write one word on the bathroom mirror: RUN!

“This is getting ridiculous,” Clarke says to no one in particular, then heads downstairs to find her landlord. She is paying rent after all, she should not have to come home from work to find her room completely trashed.

But an angry confrontation with Mister Wallace yields no answers: He's been visiting his rheumatologist all afternoon, where Cage drove him to, and that means there was no one at the house except Bellamy. Who, obviously, wouldn't do something so childishly destructive.

But what kind of burglar breaks into a house full of valuable antiques, trashes one room, and leaves without taking anything?

 _The kind that's been dead for 275 years_ , a mean voice whispers to Clarke - but that can't be it. She can't bring herself to believe that her ghost would turn against her.

Which would be kind of an unsettling thing to believe in, but Clarke's understanding of what does and doesn't pass for unsettling has shifted some time ago, and she finds nothing unusual about debating with Bellamy whether or not her trashed room is due to some strange prank, her ghost turning against her, or a second, unfriendly ghost somehow appearing to haunt her as well.

Clarke doesn't know what to believe - but she sure knows what she _wants_ to be true.

Apparently, it's the same thing Mister Wallace believes. He calls the police and talks them into processing her room like a high-profile crime scene, but their admittedly thorough search yields no sign of this being a burglary – the door doesn't show traces of forced entry, nothing's missing, and there are no fingerprints other than her own. After two wasted hours, the officers leave again, shaking their heads and not-so-surreptitiously glaring at her as they pass her by. They seem to somehow blame her for the entire thing, and Clarke isn't sure she'd trust them to help her if she was in trouble again.

Luckily, things remain quiet that night, and when Bellamy says goodbye and leaves for his sister's the next morning, she can assure him that she'll be fine and that she'll call if anything strange happens.

Shortly after Bellamy, Mister Wallace takes off to attend some kind of Christmas function, and Clarke gets to carry out the plan she came up with the night before. She makes the thirty minute trip to the next electronics store and stocks up on the last things she ever expected to be needing, plowing her way through last-minute Christmas shoppers.

Back at the house, she immediately gets to work.

Two hours later, Clarke sits down in front of her laptop and calls her best friends, trying not to be weirded out by the fact that she's just spent the last hour installing and hiding a CCTV camera in her own bedroom.

“Alright, it's all set up and should start transmitting any second now.”

Raven is staring somewhat creepily off-camera, presumably at the window that should be displaying the feed from Clarke's new surveillance equipment. But at least Wells is still interacting with her, eye contact and everything.

“Thank you guys so much for doing this! You probably have better things to do just before Christmas...”

Wells waves away her concerns. “Are you kidding? We have nothing at all to prepare for Christmas. My Dad is taking us out to a fancy restaurant tomorrow, and tonight, it'll just be the two of us in sweatpants at home, watching _Die Hard_ , eating Christmas cookies and drinking eggnog until we puke.”

Clarke laughs. “Sounds like a plan.”

Wells nods enthusiastically. “It's the best Christmas plan I've ever made. I'm just sorry we can't be there with you. You should have told us about this whole thing before all the flights were booked out.”

“Oh please, there's no reason for you guys to fly out just for me. If anything happens again, we'll get it on camera and then we'll know who the culprit is.”

Wells sighs. “Let's hope that's all there is to it. What if the next time they appear they decide to hurt you? What it...”

He doesn't get to finish, because Raven lets out a loud whoop.

“Aaaand we have contact!”

The announcement comes just as Clarke has spotted a missing sock under the bed and is bending down to retrieve it, and the next thing she knows there's a loud whistle.

“Damn, babe, you should do that in front of hot librarian dude!”

Clarke feels her face heat up, though she hopes it is merely due to the fact that she just straightened up from being bent over.

“Who's hot librarian dude?” Wells' question causes Raven to raise an eyebrow.

“What, you haven't heard of him yet? He's _important_.”

Raven's mocking singsong makes her blush deepen so much there's no doubt anymore about its reason.

“Don't call him that.” She ignores Raven's eyeroll and looks at Wells instead. “There's a historian living at the house too. He's doing some research on the family history, and...” she wonders how to finish the sentence. _He helps me find out who's haunting me_? “He's nice. I talk to him sometimes.”

“Ah.” Wells' voice is deceptively innocent, but there's a knowing smile tugging at his lips that would make her blush even more if that was possible. “Well, it's nice that you've made a friend.”

“Fuck off!” Clarke mutters, but there's no real bite behind it and Wells just laughs.

“So, apart from the fact that someone is messing around with your room, you're doing fine?”

Is she? She's only getting uninterrupted sleep every other night, and the dreams are leaving her more and more exhausted and fearful in the morning. There's something going on at the hospital that she should get to the bottom of, but instead she's chasing ghosts in her room. But on the plus side, she hasn't thought of what happened last year in a while, and between the dreams and the voices, there are nice moments too, like baking cookies with Bellamy, or reading in the library with Bellamy, or investigating historical mysteries with Bellamy...

“As fine as I'll ever be, I guess.”

Wells smiles fondly, and Clarke feels her heart warming knowing she has friends like this, friends who care about her well-being enough to help her install cameras to catch a ghost.

“And how are you guys doing?”

They chat for a while, Wells telling her that his Dad seems to have cut ties with the weird cult he's been involved with for a while, and Raven reporting from the latest hack-athon she attended, and before she knows, it's three and Clarke needs to get ready for work. But of course Raven won't let her go without firing off one last bit of inappropriate advice.

“Now remember, if someone's creeping around in your room and you feel unsafe, you can always go across the hall and slip into bed with hot librarian guy.”

“Raven! I'm not going to do that. And again, he's not a librarian.”

“So you don't deny that you think he's hot.”

“I'm a woman with artistic sensibilities. He... has a certain aesthetic appeal.” Raven cackles and Clarke can't help but grin, relishing in the moment of levity after the strain of the past few days. “You wouldn't kick him out of bed either.”

“Psh, that doesn't mean anything. I have very low standards.”

“Hey!” That's Wells, pinching his girlfriend in the side to emphasize his protest.

“ _Had_ very low standards, until I met you – the  _gold_ standard.”

“Thanks.” Raven gets a kiss for her quick save, and Clarke tries not to wrinkle her nose. It's been almost a year since her two best friends got together, but as happy as she is for them, it's still a little weird sometimes.

“Well, clearly I am no longer needed here.”

“Aw!” Raven coos mockingly. “We love you too, babe. Sleep tight!”

“And just remember: If anything's wrong, if there really is someone sneaking into your room, we'll spot them.”

Raven nods along with Wells' words, then ruins their sincerity by comically lowering her voice and adding: “We're watching you,” and Clarke laughs again.

“Thanks, that's... reassuring.”

But it actually is – Clarke feels a little safer knowing that her friends can keep an eye on her and check if there are any further ghostly shenanigans going on here.

And as for Raven's suggestion, Bellamy's absence might be for the best: She can't deny that the thought does have a certain appeal. An appeal which Clarke only allows herself to linger on for a moment before shutting down her laptop and getting ready for work. She has patients to look after.

Her discipline doesn't falter; Clarke remains focused on her patients as always. It's only when she takes a break and looks at her phone while munching on a Christms cookie that Clarke allows herself more than just a fleeting thought of dark curls and warm brown eyes. Because there's a message from Bellamy on her phone, sent at precisely midnight:

“ _Merry Christmas, Clarke!”_

Grinning like an idiot, Clarke types out a reply with flying fingers:

"Merry Christmas, Bellamy."

Shee stares at the screen for another moment, then puts her phone away with a sigh.

She may have to accept the fact that her tiny little crush has somehow grown into full-blown, head-over-heels kind of feelings.

***

 

Given Clarke's out-of-control crush and nagging panic about putting herself in a position to have her heart broken again, it's probably a good thing that Bellamy is scheduled to stay at his sister's for a few more days after Christmas – although Bellamy himself seems to disagree. As she learns from his regular text updates, Bellamy is getting increasingly impatient to get back to the house – to continue his research, Clarke reminds herself, not because of  _her_  – and he's filling the involuntary break by searching through every digitally accessible archive that might have some clue on the Wallace family's history.

But while Bellamy is itching to get on with their historical scavenger hunt, Clarke's own detective work is drawing close to fruition.

With the hospital quieting down over the holidays, Clarke finally has time to look over the files her IT whiz Monty has amassed. With Maya's help, she soon makes out an undeniable pattern: the alteration made to the files is usually that at least one prescription for medication has been added to them. in many cases, they are prescriptions Clarke remembers writing - and she remembers Cage telling her they've been denied by the patient's insurance. Except the insurance companies received a bill that includes that very same medication - and in most cases, seem to have paid for it without protest.

Cage Wallace is committing insurance fraud on a grand scale, and endangering people in the process.

The question is, how is she going to stop him?

Clarke has Monty send her digital copies of every single contaminated file he found, then heads home to think. She has to alert the police soon, and the insurance companies too. But the problem is, while her prescriptions of the medication have been preserved, the version of the files where she recorded what she actually administered has been tampered with to match both the prescription and the bill, and since Monty can't find a way to reverse it, it's her word against Cage's. She'd love nothing more than to call the police on him right away, but that would tip him off and give him an opportunity to cover his tracks, and that won't do. She needs more proof.

 


	4. January

_January_

Clarke is so busy gnawing on the problem of how to get Cage behind bars that she's barely had time to think about the mystery of her ghostly friend, whom she can still hear praying from time to time but who hasn't gifted her with a dream in weeks. Until the night, just after New Year's, before Bellamy's supposed to come back.

This time, the room where her dream transports her is not at the manor house, but it looks vaguely familiar anyway.

Amid stark white walls and a rough, wood-panelled floor, the girl is standing in the middle of the big room, facing three men seated at a table. One of them seems to be a Reverend, judging by his black robe and white collar, the other is wearing a powdered wig and clutching a wooden gavel, and the third... Her blood freezes at the sight. The third man facing her with a stony expression is Wallace senior, Thomas's father, whom she last saw when he tried to beat the living daylights out of her with a riding crop.

Looking around the room, Clarke tries to ascertain what's happening. There are rows of benches behind her, packed with people who are all staring at her with angry expressions, muttering amongst themselves.

In a wooden box to her left sits a woman who seems familiar - a neighbour perhaps, someone the girl treated at some point?

Clarke's guess turns out to be completely correct, but she soon wishes it wasn't. Because with tears streaming down her face, the woman tells a chilling tale: of how the girl came by to treat her youngest, a girl of six who had fallen ill with the fever. How she gave her some strange mixture to drink and wrapped her in cloth bindings and whispered to her. And how, just a week later, the child had fallen even more violently ill, and rapidly succumbed to the fever.

Wracked with tears, the woman points at the girl - at Clarke - and shrieks:

"You killed my daughter! You sicced your witchcraft on her and the Lord took her soul!"

And suddenly Clarke is thrown back to her own much more recent past, to the parents she had to inform of their daughter's death, to their tears and curses and accusations...

But that was different. The little girl she saw her ghostly healer treat was always going to die, she never even stood a chance... But no one hears Clarke when she yells it out, as the room has erupted into furious noise. It takes several hard knocks with the gavel for people to quiet down enough that the judge (she assumes) can make himself heard.

"Now, Madam Sanders, I'll ask you to stick to the facts and not bring up such outlandish claims..."

He is cut off when the elder Wallace raises his hand, a commanding gesture at odds with his patronisingly benevolent tone.

"Your honour, surely you would not reprimand a grieving mother for a show of feeling."

The man really is a judge then, the gathering a trial - and the girl the accused.

"No, of course not. We will determine what killed your child, and see to it that the culprit is punished."

Eerily, that prompts a smile from the Wallace patriarch.

"I dare say the culprit has been found already. Emotional though they may have been presented before us, the facts are clear: The accused, instead of caring for a sick child, administered some sort of primitive nostrum and spoke some superstitious incantations... and now the child is dead."

Again there are murmurs and titters from the crowd, but the girl bravely tries to yell over them.

"I gave her a simple herbal infusion, a household recipe to bring down the fever. Ask your mothers, they'll have fed the same to you as a babe."

But if anything, her protest enrages the crowd even further.

"She admits it! She gave the child the potion that killed it!"

"Nothing I administered could ever kill someone!"

"Lies!" someone in the crowd yells out.

For the first time since Clarke started watching the trial, the Reverend seated on the judge's other side speaks up, a look on his face that is equal parts fear and pity.

"We may not be able to know the nature of the medicine in question. But perhaps someone can attest to the character of the witness to tell us if she would lie so shamelessly?"

The disgruntled mutters throughout the room tell her what the crowd thinks of the suggestion.But the girl picks it up eagerly, clinging to it like a lifeline.

“There is such a person! Your Honour, I have a character witness....”

The image of Thomas emerges before her inner eye and tells Clarke who the girl is speaking of. And with it, Clarke feels the girl's hope flicker within her, mixed with desperation to see just one sympathetic face, to draw strength from looking at the man she loves one last time and fill her heart with something other than fear and hatred before she goes towards her death. Because that, Clarke realizes as she feels the heavy weight settling over the girl's conscious, is what the girl is doing: She's getting ready to die.

“Ah yes, of course. You see,” Wallace can barely conceal a smug smile as he addresses the townsfolk, “not only does this wretch hand out questionable cures, but she has drawn my own son under her spell, by immoral means no doubt." And in that moment, Clarke knows that the help the girl has been counting on is not going to arrive. "Well, I have made sure to keep him sheltered from her evil whisperings, and to have him returned once more to the god-fearing, obedient child he once was.”

The judge seems thoroughly uncomfortable in the face of Wallace's apparent triumph, but makes no attempt to wrestle back control over the situation.

"So, with all the facts stated ascertained and no one willing to speak on behalf of the accused, I now ask the Magistrate to speak his judgment."

Magistrate, Clarke thinks distractedly, not a judge then. It doesn't matter of course – whatever title he's addressed by, this man holds the power to end the girl's life, and Clarke prays with every shred of faith she ever had that the he'll stand up for her just once during this sham of a trial.

But when the Magistrate raises his voice again, he dashes all her hopes.

“Charlotte Collins, you are hereby accused of murder by the practise of witchcraft. When you have said your prayers, you shall be hanged by the neck unto your death, as is custom for crimes such as yours.”

Clarke gasps as she finally hears the girl's name for the first time - and as she makes the connection: " _Charlotte Collins, you are hereby accused of murder by the practise of witchcraft..."_

The girl is Bellamy's missing witch.

And like the so-called witches that died half a century before her, this girl too will hang.

***

 

In the last hour of her life, Charlotte clings to her prayers, repeating them as she's made to wait in a bare little cell off the courtroom, as she's dragged back outside again, as she's pushed and shoved by the crowd to a little hill just outside of town. Walking towards it, Clarke remembers Bellamy pointing it out to her. "Gallows Hill" he said the locals called it. There's a big old oak tree at top of the hill – and sturdy wooden gallows beneath it, with a length of rope already dangling down from the horizontal beam.

Throat tight, Clarke can't take her eyes off the sight as they approach. Soon she's able to make out the characteristic shape of a noose at the end of the rope, then see that someone brought a wooden stool and placed it underneath the ghoulish construct. By now, everything inside her is screaming and raging at the raucous crowd jostling her forward, at the silence of the Magistrate and the Reverend, at the satisfied little smirk of Thomas' father. But beneath the rage there is fear.

Somewhere deep down, Clarke knows she's not really in danger, knows that she'll wake up from this nightmare and be back in her bed at the manor, most likely warm and snug, and with the option of calling any number of people to console her.

Charlotte, on the other hand, is alone. Alone and shivering in the icy winter air and terrified of dying. Clarke wishes she could reach out to her somehow, to comfort her and give her strength in return for all the times Charlotte's joy and faith have reached out to her. But everything happening here has happened long ago, and Clarke is powerless to change it.

Still the girl prays, still her back remains ramrod straight, her eyes wide open, her face carefully blank. She lets them lift her onto the chair with tears running down her face and thinks of Thomas, whose smile makes him more beautiful than any other of God's creatures.

Her last prayer she says out loud, the Lord's prayer, and she holds Wallace's gaze as she speaks the middle part: "And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us."

The Reverend somehow manages to hold everyone back until she's finished praying. Then someone kicks at the stool and the ground drops out from under her feet.

***

 

Clarke wakes on a choked breath, hands clawing at her neck where she can still feel the rough rope, tightening with a crack and an unbearable pressure on her neck.

She just died.

Or rather, Charlotte did. And her ghost, apparently, remembers the experience.

Clarke sits up in bed, heart racing and nausea rising within her. She grasps around for the glass of water on her nightstand and downs it, noticing as she moves that her pyjamas are clinging to her skin with cold sweat.

She feels drained as if she'd walked that long, dreadful walk herself, and weighed down by an overwhelming sadness. And giving in, Clarke curls ínto a ball, pulls her blanket over herself, and weeps for young Charlotte, fearless and strong even in the face of death.

***

 

She considers calling in sick to work, but the thought of lying in bed and reliving Charlotte's death is less than appealing, and so Clarke hops into her car and drives to the hospital, hoping rather irresponsibly that nothing serious is going to come in today.

Little does she know that this is the day Cage Wallace decides to kill her.

Obviously, he doesn't announce his intention to do so. But given what she's found out about his activities, Clarke has a bad feeling the moment Cage approaches her just as she's about to get into her car and asks if she can give him a ride to the mansion.

“My car broke down this morning and I brought it to the garage, but my father just asked me to come out and help with some stuff.” He smiles in a way that she's sure is supposed to be charming but only comes across as smarmy. “And he can be very insistent when he's got an idea into his head.”

Clarke racks her brain for some excuse, but he's already walked over to the passenger's side door and got in. She's about to protest, or to claim that she forgot something in her locker and needs to get back inside, when he pulls a gun out of his coat and points it at her.

“Let's go. Now.”

Clarke still hesitates – the car isn't running yet, maybe she can jump out and run for cover... but that doesn't seem like a very realistic option. Plus, she realises, Monty and Maya are still inside. And if Cage knows they helped her, he might come after them too. It's better to lure him away from the hospital and then think of something.

With shaking hands, she starts the car and backs out of the parking space, driving along the now-familiar route with automatic movements and trying to appear calm as her thoughts run a mile a minute.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because you are too nosy for your own good.”

“I don't understand.”

“Oh, I think you do.”

Clarke doubts there's anything she can do to convince him that she doesn't know what he's been up to at the hospital, so she figures she might as well address the issue head on.

“You're stealing from the hospital. From your patients.”

“The hospital pays me way less than they should, and my father is about to blow my whole inheritance on the stupid house. I'm only taking what I'm owed.”

“It's not the hospital who's paying for it though, or your father. It's the patients whose treatment you're denying.”

“They'll be fine. None of them are fatal cases.”

“You don't know that. They may well get much worse without their treatment and turn into fatal cases. Sooner or later, someone will die because of your little scheme. Their blood will be on your hands.”

Cage scoffs disparagingly.

"I hardly think you're one to talk about endangering patients. You've got blood on your hands just like me."

Clarke clutches the steering wheel as hard as she can, tries to focus on the smooth leather under her hands and not on Cage's words. She can't let him bait her, not if she wants to get out of this alive. And she does, she decides and thinks of her mom, of Wells and Raven, of her patients and co-workers and of Bellamy with his stupid floppy hair and freckled smile.

“Ironically, it's exactly why I hired you. I figured after that whole scandal with the dead girl, you'd consider it in your own best interests to keep your head down and not cause any trouble. Clearly, I was wrong.”

They're not going much faster than 30, but the town passing by the windows is turning blurry as tears shoot to her eyes. All this time Clarke thought she'd been given a second chance, an opportunity to leave last year's mistakes behind and start fresh – and now it turns out Cage hired her not in spite of the mark in her ledger, but because of it.

But Clarke is resolved not to let him know how deeply the knowledge cuts. She adapts a mockin tone instead.

“You really thought I'd risk having more patients die in my care? Clearly, that's where you made your first mistake.”

“Clearly.” He sounds angry now, which is at once alarming and deeply satisfying.

“But there'll be no more mistakes. We're going to the house and destroying every bit of evidence you may have collected on me. And then... hm, I think then you'll have a very unfortunate accident of some kind.”

Clarke's throat tightens painfully. The house... where Bellamy returned to this afternoon.

“I don't have any evidence. Not in my room.”

“We'll check anyway, just in case.” He's calm again, infuriatingly so, and Clarke knows with sudden icy clarity that he can't make it back to the house. Not with the gun in his hand and murder in his voice.

“After all,” Cage continues, voice grating on Clarke's taut nerves, “you've been snooping around my family's home for the past weeks. It's only fair I get to snoop around your room for a chance.”

“I haven't been snooping. I've been helping Bellamy with his research. Research your father hired him to do.”

Cage grins lecherously. “Helping with research, is that what you're calling it? Don't worry, I couldn't care less what you and our resident history nerd get up to in the attic. Unless, of course, you've told him about the files?”

“I haven't.” It's true, but she's not sure Cage will believe her. “Bellamy wouldn't understand the issue anyway – like you said, he's a history nerd, not a doctor.”

“You do spend an awful lot of time together though. I'm sure you're not only talking about my family's boring history.”

Clarke shrugs, trying to appear innocent. “I like history. It's kind of a hobby.” Her voice is light, nonchalant, but fear is clenching at her stomach as she watches the scenery pass by. They'll be at the mansion soon, where apparently Bellamy is now in danger too. And that is unacceptable.

In her head, she goes through the last stretch of road before them. They'll pass through the forest for the last part of the way, crossing a creek on a little stone bridge before turning right onto the Wallace estate. She can try and race past the turnoff, of course, but not without the risk of Cage shooting her on the spot.

She's so focused on getting away from her kidnapper that it takes her a moment to register Cage's next words. When she does, she almost drives the car off the road.

"Does he know what you did? Blake, I mean."

Clarke remains silent, refusing to rise to the bait. It's not like he can make her respond to his taunts - not when his life depends on her driving too.

And there, she realises, lies the flaw in his plan.

"He's quite smitten with you, you know.“ He says it lightly, as if they were holding this conversation over coffee instead of locked in a life-or-death battle of wills. “I wonder if that will change when he finds out the good doctor is a murderer."

A childish part of her wants to gloat and tell him that Bellamy already knows – knows, and still stayed by her side.

The part that is focused on nothing but survival spots the little bridge up ahead, taking in its familiar features with new eyes. It's not very far down from the bridge into the stream below, and she's just recently read in the local paper that while the bridge's stone foundation is in good condition, the rotting wooden banisters are supposed ro be replaced in the spring.

She takes a deep breath as the car drives onto the bridge, then abruptly jerks the steering wheel to the left and hits the gas. The car skids a little on the frost-covered ground, surges forward, and crashes through the banister.

Despite having fastened her seatbelt, Clarke gets thrown forward at the impact, then pushed back into her seat as the car tips forward and plunges down – and then it hits the sloping bank of the stream with a splash and the airbag blows up in her face.

***

Clarke doesn't know how long she stays slumped over the slowly deflating airbag, her ears ringing and her head throbbing painfully. Then her scrambled thoughts slowly turn more coherent, until she finally manages to scrape together the gist of the situation: Cage Wallace wants to kill her.

She struggles to open her eyes and lift her head, half expecting to see a gun pointed at her when she does. But Cage is knocked out next to her, slumped over the dashboard with blood trickling down the side of his face... And the gun has fallen from his hand and slid forward on the dashboard. Unfastening her seatbelt, Clarke stretches towards it, fingertips frantically scrambling around until she finally gets a hold of the compact but heavy gun and pulls it towards her. She hopes she won't have to use it – but she will if she has to.

Her door opens with no more effort than a bit of rattling, and Clarke clambers out – and lands thigh-deep in icy water.

Right. She drove the car into a stream. She forgot about that fact in her haste to get away from Cage.

Gritting her teeth at the icy water as it seeps through her jeans and boots, Clarke starts wading to the nearby shore and clambers out, slipping on the frozen mud and cutting her hand on the sharp edge of a rock. She doesn't even feel it, adrenaline and the cold making her all but numb to any injuries she may have sustained during the crash. Which is a good thing in her situation, Clarke knows – she has no idea where her phone is, so she has to walk back to the house and call the police from there. The longer she's able to work on autopilot the better.

Getting up the steep bank to the road is a struggle, but Clarke is filled with anger and worry and lets it propel her forward. People suffered because of Cage, they could have died and could still die for his greed. She's not going to let him get away with that.

Her teeth start to chatter within minutes of getting out of the water, her soaked jeans now clinging to her skin and refusing to dry in the icy air. She tries not to worry about it, not to think about the very real threat of hypothermia. The house can't be too far from here – although it's one thing to zip down the road in her warm car and quite another to drag herself along in wet clothing and freezing temperatures.

She lets out a sigh of relief when the tall roof of the Wallace mansion finally comes into view above the trees. Dragging herself through the gate and up to the door, Clarke tries and fails to fumble her keys into the lock, her hands already too stiff from the cold. Desperate, she eventually resorts to just banging on the door and calling Bellamy's name.

As luck would have it, he's not in the attic and so he actually hears her, because after just a few hard knocks the door is yanked open to reveal Bellamy's worried face. (Really, at this point he should just stop worrying about her.)

“Clarke?” A beat as he takes her in, then: “What the hell happened to you?”

Clarke tries to answer, but her teeth are chattering violently by now and Bellamy doesn't seem to be finished with his examination yet.

“You're soaked. And bleeding!”

“C-car a-accident.”

She's swaying on her feet as exhaustion slowly sets in and overpowers the adrenaline. Bellamy catches her before she falls over and helps her inside - just like he did that first night, but Clarke is too keyed up to observe the similarities.

Without central heating or a fireplace, the hall is almost as cold as the outside, and Clarke stumbles towards the stairs, clutching the banister and trying to pull herself up the stairs. She needs to get somewhere warm, and she needs to get out of her wet clothes.

Bellamy catches up with her within seconds, his hands going around her waist to haul her upstairs.

“How did this happen? Are you hurt?”

“D-don't know. C-cage t-tried to k-kill me.”

“He what?” Bellamy stops so abruptly they almost fall down the stairs again.

“Long story.” Her legs are still frozen numb, but Bellamy is giving off enough warmth for her to get her teeth to almost stop chattering. “You need to c-call the police. I'll explain everything once I'm out of these cold clothes, just get them here.”

Bellamy nods and doesn't ask any further questions, although she can practically feel his heavy, worried gaze on her. He insists on helping her all the way into her room and even takes off her shoes when it becomes clear that her hands are still too stiff to work the laces.

“Police, now!” Clarke reminds him when it looks like he wants to start fussing over her again, and Bellamy begrudgingly leaves to get his phone.

She's changed into dry clothes and is pulling a thick sweater over her head when she hears voices outside her door.

“Let me through.”

“I'm not going to do that.”

Having identified the voices as belonging to Bellamy and Dante Wallace, Clarke wonders what the hell is going on – until she hears Wallace's reply, the clear threat in his voice.

“Step aside. This doesn't concern you.”

“I think you're wrong about that.”

Yanking her sweater down, Clarke steps outside into the corridor – and smacks straight into Bellamy's back. Standing right in front of her door, he's blocking the entrance to her room from none other than their landlord, who is clutching an old-fashioned hunting rifle and currently pointing it at Bellamy.

Her heart falters for a second, then gallops on at twice the speed.

Cage's father was in on it. He knew what his son was doing, and she never even considered that that could be a possibility. It never occurred to her that in escaping one criminal, she was delivering herself right into the hands of another – and Bellamy too, the very person she wanted to keep safe, and who's now put himself between her and a loaded rifle. At least, she assumes it's loaded, and she's not going to risk Bellamy's life to find out.

“Put down the rifle, Mister Wallace. Let's talk about this.”

She steps forward, placing herself right in front of Bellamy despite his cry of protest. Oddly, feeling him at her back makes it easier to calmly look past the gun at Wallace.

“I'm sure we can find a solution without anyone getting hurt.”

“First you're going to tell me what you've done to my son! Last I heard of him, he was going to get into your car.”

“Oh, he did – to kidnap and kill me!” Clarke feels anger roaring inside of her just thinking about it. But anger won't help her now – she's not the one holding the weapon. “But don't worry – he's alive. We had a car crash and it knocked him out. If you let me call an ambulance, they can get to him and make sure he'll be alright.”

“No one's calling anyone. You're going to get him and make sure of that yourself. You're a doctor, aren't you?” The question is a rhetorical one, and Wallace doesn't wait for her answer before gesturing for her to walk towards the stairs. “Let's go.”

“You can't make her go back out there. She was freezing when she got here,” Bellamy protests, and Wallace actually pauses to consider. “I'll help you get him. Just let her stay and get warmed up.”

“Bellamy, no!” The stupid, stupid man is seriously going to put himself in the hands of those two lunatics just to keep her safe and warm. It's infurating.

Unfortunately, Dante seems willing to accept Bellamy's offer. He points the rifle at Bellamy again, motions for him to walk over to the window at the end of the hall.

“Alright. Get one of those curtain ropes and tie her to the banister.”

“How about the library? Near the fire so she can get warm?”

Clarke wonders what Bellamy's plan is – is he simply trying to stall? Did he perhaps manage to call the police before Wallace stopped him? She can only hope, but in his case, it seems just as likely he's got nothing planned and really just wants to make sure she's warm and comfortable. Which, medically speaking, is just sensible – she contracted at least mild hypothermia, and hasn't really had a chance to warm up beyond changing into dry clothes. A fire would be just the thing – if it didn't mean sending Bellamy out into the night with an armed criminal, that is.

“Stop fussing and just tie her up.” Wallace sounds irritated, but he doesn't protest when Bellamy pulls her into the library and steers her towards the fireplace.

“Get on with it then! My son is out there, probably injured. I don't want to hurt anyone, but if you keep stalling I will have to.”

Clarke puts her hands together and holds them out for Bellamy to tie. “Come on."

He leans over her hands as he starts wrapping the curtain rope around them, lowering his voice to whisper. “Maybe they'll let us go.”

Clarke shakes her head so that her hair comes loose and obscures her face as she whispers back. “Cage won't. He won't want any witnesses.”

Bellamy looks at her for a long moment, and there's an angry glint in his eyes that she hasn't seen since he told her about the unknown witch he's trying to find and rehabilitate. But stronger than the anger is pain and worry and guilt shining back at her before he returns his attention to his handiwork.

“I'm sorry about this.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about. I'm sorry for dragging you into this.”

“Still. I want you to know that I usually only tie women up consensually.” The words are accompanied by a nervous grin, but when she only stares at him instead of replying, it promptly drops off his face. “Shit, I'm sorry, I didn't mean... I make stupid jokes when I'm nervous. It's a thing.”

Clarke wants to explain that she's not offended in the least, except maybe by the fact that he chooses _this_ moment to start awkwardly flirting with her, but now Dante Wallace gets impatient.

“What's taking so long?”

And then, in his impatience, Dante makes a mistake: He steps closer and yanks the loose end of the rope out of Bellamy's hands, causing him to lose focus on the rifle and stop aiming it at them.

In a move truly unexpected for a book-loving historian, Bellamy uses Dante's distraction to ram his head into the older man's stomach and tackle him to the ground. Before he can raise the rifle again, Bellamy has smashed it out of his hand and pushed it out of reach, and then it doesn't take long for the old man to realise he is completely overpowered.

Clarke has struggled out of her ties, ready to jump into the fray, but Bellamy already has the situation under control. All she has to do is pick up the rifle and hand Bellamy the rope, which is a good thing because even those small movements feel taxing.

A minute later, it's Dante sitting on the couch with his hands tied, and Bellamy is calling the police while Clarke watches their kidnapper-turned-prisoner, rifle loosely in hand.

"So you knew what your son was up to.“

"He did what he had to do. And for the record, I was against killing you. I hoped you'd just leave if we prodded you a bit. You are clearly unstable, judging by your talk of ghosts and visions, and considering what you did at your last hospital... I thought if I just added a little bit to that strain, you'd give up and leave. But you weren't even fazed by my haunting.”

Clarke can only stare at him, her mind reeling with the admission. So the strange occurences of the last few days – the bookcase, the open windows, the trashed room – that was Dante's doing?

“That was _you_?”

“I had to do something! We're not just taking money for ourselves, you know – we are preserving this country's history.”

“How?” Bellamy asks, putting his phone away and joining Clarke before the sofa, as if the mere mention of the word “history” had summoned him.

"Do you think the upkeep for this house is cheap? And yet it once belonged to the most important family in the area. History was made here, I'm not going to let the place go to ruins!” Dante looks almost pained, and yet Clarke finds no pity for him inside her.

"And saving the house is worth killing innocent people?"

"We never killed anyone."

"Oh really? Tell that to the people whose treatments your son denied. How many of them are going to suffer because of you?" Clarke can feel rage scratching at the back of her throat, sharp and hot.

"We saved an invaluable piece of history. Our family's heritage. Three centuries of magnificence."

Dante's voice is even, but his shifting eyes tell her what she needs to know: he knew it was wrong, and did it anyway. Decided that this house, in its crumbling glory, was worth more than the lives of innocents.

Clarke can't believe she's still hearing this; that the same hybris and self-centred cruelty that killed a bright girl almost three centuries ago is still alive in this house, still causing its owners to abuse their power to their own ends.

In a fit of rage, Clarke lifts the rifle and points it at the white-haired man before her.

"You won't shoot me, Clarke, you can't. You're a doctor."

Yes, she's a doctor. And she swore to protect her patients.

She's struggling with the safety when Bellamy's voice penetrates through the red haze in her head and stops her.

“Don't do this, Clarke. Not for him.”

“People like him, they keep hurting and killing others for their own gain, and they've been getting away with it for centuries!” Her voice is shaking, close to breaking, but she doesn't lower the gun yet, even if she knows this isn't just about her – it's about Charlotte too, and as little as it will help her, Clarke is feverishly sure that spilling Dante Wallace's blood will somehow make up for the innocent life his ancestor took all those years ago.

But then Bellamy lays his hand on hers where she's clutching the rifle.

“Not anymore. The police are on their way. He'll get what he deserves, and you don't have to do this to yourself to make sure of it.”

And that's when Clarke remembers: Charlotte may have been alone and helpless, but she's not. She has Bellamy by her side, and a legal system that has much improved since 1740. There will be no witch-hunt today, and no impossible sacrifices for her to make.

She lets go of the gun.

***

The police arrive soon after, and after what feels like hours of interrogation, Clarke is only saved from keeling over in sheer exhaustion by Bellamy's insistence on calling an ambulance and having her checked out.

And not a moment too soon, it turns out: The worried paramedics take her straight to the hospital and tuck her into bed, and before the night is over, Clarke has contracted a fever that overshadows everything else. The last thing she remembers is Bellamy, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to her bed.

"Get some rest.“

And she does – for several days, Clarke drifts in and out of consciousness as her colleagues battle pneumonia and sepsis she has contracted while sitting around with hypothermia and an untreated cut, and only once she's pumped full of antibiotics and has struggled through a week of fever does she finally start to recover for good.

At some point during that week, her mother flew out to be by her side, and as soon as she's discharged, Abby is taking her home to the Wallace house, which, luckily, she's still allowed to live in under the same conditions while the Wallaces are in custody. Under her mother's gentle care, she recovers quickly, and is soon able to receive visitors. Maya and Monty inform her that the fraud case is under investigation and that all her patients' treatments are readjusted. And Bellamy swings by daily to keep her updated on the police's investigation and the charges brought against the Wallaces, inform her of his rare findings about Charlotte Collins, and steadfastly ignore her mother's curious glances, which amuses Clarke to no end.

Soon, Clarke is well enough again to swap her bed for the sofa in the library, and things return to some form of normal. Her mother, after making her promise that she really is recovering and that she'll call if she gets worse and that she won't start looking for a new place until she's completely recovered, flies back home. After all, Wells and Raven, who have been skyping her daily but couldn't get any time off work on such short notice, will get there in a few days, so there's no shortage of chaperones. Not to mention there's always Bellamy, who fusses over her worse than her mother and forces her to down tea and nibble on healthy, strengthening snacks in hourly intervals.

Amid all the fuss, it takes Clarke some time to notice the biggest change in her circumstances: The dreams have stopped, and so have the voices. There are no more glimpses into Charlotte's life, no more soft prayers at the edge of her consciousness. It's as if with Charlotte's imagined death, the ghost of her has died too – or, as Bellamy suspects when she tells him about her final dream and the end of her visions: Maybe by showing Clarke the end of her story, Charlotte has fulfilled her mission and is now at peace.

Clarke isn't sure she really believes that. If so, what did Charlotte achieve by having no more than two people know about her fate?

But then Bellamy finds something that makes her think that maybe, his idea isn't so far off base.

It's a rare mild day, with the sun coming out for the first time in what feels like weeks, and Clarke decides that she's been cooped up long enough. Bellamy is busy going through a box of old books the police unearthed when they searched Dante's study but deemed irrelevant to the case, and he's currently wholly engrossed in his task. Bunding herself up snugly, Clarke heads outside to take a leisurely stroll across the garden, enjoying the fresh air and mild winter sun.

She has just made it back at her glacial pace when Bellamy bursts out the door, waving something in his hand – a book, she thinks, and wonders what on earth prompted him to be so careless with what looks like a fairly old document.

But the excited look on his face soon tells her that this isn't just any old document.

“I've found something.“ Then he laughs, short and breathless. "Actually, I've found everything. The whole damn story.“

That sentence all but electrifies her, since there's only one story he could be referring to.

“What? How?“

“Thomas wrote it all down in his diary.“

The idea of actually finding proof of what happened makes her sway on her feet, and Bellamy quickly offers her his arm to guide her over to a bench near the porch.

He sits down next to her on the bench, apparently settling in for a longer story.

“According to a letter tucked into the diary, Thomas wrote it while he was staying with his aunt, and gave it to her for safekeeping. He made her promise never to let it fall into his father's hands, and it seems she kept that promise. The letter I found was written by her great-granddaughter, who sent it to her cousin along with the diary – Thomas' grandniece. Apparently she thought it would be better stored with Thomas' closer family. Except given what he wrote in it, I'm surprised they didn't burn it on the spot.”

“What happened to him?”

“He tried to intervene, at the trial you told me about. His father sent him away to help his aunt with some made-up task just before he had Charlotte arrested, and by the time her grandmother wrote to him and he rushed back, it was too late. She was already dead.”

Clarke swallows hard, overwhelmed with the scope of human tragedy laid out before her.

“So he tried to save her. And he failed.”

Bellamy nods sadly.

“He tried to contest the Magistrate's verdict, to have her pronounced innocent posthumously, but without success – the man was probably firmly in old Wallace's pocket. After that, Thomas left town and severed all ties to his father. He went to live with his aunt for a while, where he wrote that diary and entrusted it to her for safekeeping, and then he just... disappeared. Maybe he changed his name, moved out West, returned to family in England.... I don't know. It seems he never had any contact with his father again, or acted under his family name. But he wrote down everything that happened to Charlotte, and named everyone who had anything to do with it. He made sure her name would not be forgotten.”

“But none of the people who did this to her were ever held accountable for it. None of them suffered like she did.”

“Wallace senior lost his son, the heir he treasured so much. He had another son from a second marriage, much later, but I like to believe that, until then, he was plagued by the fear that he was letting the family name die out.”

It's a small consolation, and does nothing to calm the anger inside her.

“But that fear, that _stupid_ , imagined fear is nothing compared to what Charlotte went through. Because of Lord Wallace's hate and prejudice, she had to walk up that hill and let them hang her. Because of him, she died an awful, violent death.”

Bellamy is silent for a moment after her outbreak, clearly unsure what to say. She wonders what he thinks of her reaction to the whole story – does he think she's being hysterical? That the whole thing drove her a little mad?

But his voice when he anwers is soft, and gives no indication that he thinks any less of her now than he did before.

“Charlotte may have died, but her story, her name will survive – we've made sure of that.”

Clarke swallows hard, angrily wiping away the tears escaping her eyes. She gets what he means, why he thinks that it will be enough, but she can't find the same kind of hope in it. To Bellamy, Charlotte has only ever been a name he didn't know, a puzzle he finally managed to solve. To her... to her she's been thoughts and feelings and hopes and _love_ , _so much_ love. She's not sure a line in a historical record will make up for the fact that all that strength, that great capacity for love, was snuffed out so early.

“What about her body? Was she buried?”

“They didn't normally bury witches, or they did it in unmarked graves outside of town. But according to this,” he taps the diary, “Thomas later buried every keepsake he had of hers in a place on the grounds, a place which, according to him, only he and Charlotte's grandmother knew about. She got her final resting place, in a way.”

It's still only a faint consolation, still not enough to chase off the memories of the fear and pain that clouded Charlotte's last moments, and Bellamy must have noticed her dejection.

Hesitatingly, he puts an arm around her shoulder, and Clarke leans into him, glad to have something solid to anchor her to the present.

“I know it's not much. And it can never undo what's been done to her. But.... you need to let go of that. She's at peace, and she'll get her justice, as much of it as we can give her.”

“I know there's nothing we can do. But... I've _felt_ her, Bellamy. For months, I've felt what she felt, thought what she thought. And I couldn't help her.”

“No, you couldn't. But there are other people you can help, people you already helped. You made sure your patients will get the treatment they need. You're helping people in the _present_. I'm sure she'd appreciate that.”

Clarke nods, hesitantly. Yes, Charlotte would do the same, she's sure.

And then her thoughts grind to a stop, because Bellamy leans his head against hers, rests very still for a moment, and then presses a kiss to the top of her head.

“She's dead, and you've done all you can for her. But _you_ are alive.”

His voice sounds a little choked now, his hand tightens briefly on her shoulder, and Clarke summons all her courage and turns to look at him.

His eyes are already on her when she meets his gaze, soft and caring in that way that makes her feel warm inside, and he's leaning towards her ever so slighty, as if by drawing back she's pulled him with her by some invisible string. But he doesn't do anything more than look at her, the hint of a smile etching faint dimples into his cheeks – this is her move to make.

She leans forward, heart hammering in her chest, and kisses him. And then he cups her neck to bring her closer and she melts into him and fearful thunder turns into a joyful roar, and all thoughts of past tragedies are forgotten. There's only her and him and a future that looks a lot brighter than it did when she first set foot in this house.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have to give a shout-out to my lovely history advisor Nourgelitnius, who helped me make the historical details in this as accurate as possible. If they aren't that's not because she told me incorrect things but because I ignored her advice in favour of progressing my plot and because I'm lazy.  
> ETA: I realised that this thing was reeeeaaallly long, so I split it up into different chapters.


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